Metalinguistic Ability in Bilingual Children: The Role of Executive Control

Although bilingual children tend to obtain lower scores than their monolingual peers on tests of formal language ability, they exhibit a processing advantage on non-verbal executive control (EC) tasks. This advantage may be attributable to EC practice that bilinguals routinely receive from the constant need to manage attention to two jointly activated languages. Metalinguistic tasks, unlike linguistic tasks, require children to access both their language knowledge (i.e., representations) and recruit EC ability; that is, metalinguistic tasks require children to use attentional processes to operate on linguistic forms. In this article, we review our recent studies examining linguistic and metalinguistic abilities in tasks that differed in the extent to which solutions were based on linguistic knowledge (representations) or control processes, allowing us to examine the relative contribution of each to bilingual language processing. Results indicate that bilinguals' superior EC ability allows them to compensate for weaker linguistic knowledge in metalinguistic tasks where greater recruitment of control processes is required.