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The cognitive status of metalinguistic knowledge in speakers of one or more languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2020

Michael Sharwood Smith Open the ORCID record for Michael Sharwood Smith [Opens in a new window]
Michael Sharwood Smith*
Affiliation:
Heriot-Watt University
*
Address for correspondence: Michael Sharwood Smith, E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The term ‘metalinguistic’ is used to define the kind of ability whereby people for various purposes view language as an object. It is strongly associated with consciousness and touches on many aspects of literacy, multilingualism and language acquisition. Discussions in the research literature have generally been on specific aspects of metalinguistic knowledge: the time is ripe for a more fundamental reassessment focusing on how exactly metalinguistic ability is represented and processed on line, and how it fits in with other kinds of representation and processing. To this end, a particular theoretical perspective that takes into account contemporary research in cognitive science, the Modular Cognition Framework, will be applied with the aim of supporting further empirical investigations into this area of language ability and locating it within an integrated approach to cognition in general. Finally, the usefulness of metalinguistic knowledge will be briefly considered.

Keywords

metacognitionmodularityexplicitimplicitdeclarative knowledgeprocedural knowledgelanguage processinglanguage acquisition
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 185 - 196
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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