This dissertation presents 3 studies that investigate the metalinguistic skills of monolingual children in relation to their exposure to non-native languages. In Study 1, children with large amounts of past exposure to non-English languages were more likely than minimally exposed children to endorse both English and Spanish labels for the same objects. This finding was not explained by fluency in a non-English language. In Study 2, English-speaking children’s multilingual awareness (i.e., their understanding that non-native speakers can communicate meaningful information) was assessed. The majority of children had some past experience with Spanish but no experience with Tagalog or Lithuanian. Children were asked to compare the speech of an English speaker to that of a Lithuanian speaker. Half of these children also heard a Spanish speaker as part of the task, while the remaining half heard Tagalog. Results suggest that only children who heard a Spanish speaker in the study were able to scaffold from their past Spanish experience to make the further inference that the Lithuanian speaker could be saying the same thing as the English speaker. This finding suggests that children might be able to use past non-native language experience to make inferences about the content of new non-native speakers. Finally, Study 3 expanded upon Study 1 by manipulating the language exposure that children received, and assessing children’s subsequent willingness to endorse both native and non-native labels. Results show that children willing to endorse labels across languages are also more willing to learn additional vocabulary from both speakers. This suggests that children’s metalinguistic awareness might have behavioral consequences with respect to their willingness to learn from speakers of non-native languages. Altogether, the findings from this dissertation highlight the importance of language exposure in understanding the development of metalinguistic awareness, and suggest that we may have historically underestimated these skills in monolingual children.Psycholog
