Abstract
Demonstrations of some young children’s awareness of syntactic and semantic properties of language are presented. Rudiments of such “metalinguistic” functioning are shown in 2-year-olds, who give judgments of grammaticalness in a role-modeling situation. The growth of these abilities is documented for a group of 5- to 8-year-old children, who are asked explicitly to give judgments of deviant sentences. Adultlike behavior, in these talented subjects, is found to emerge in the period from 5 to 8 years. Possible relations of metalinguistic functioning to other “metacognitive” processes are suggested.
This paper is reprinted with permission from Cognition, International Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1972,1(2–3), 137–164.
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Gleitman, L.R., Gleitman, H., Shipley, E.F. (1977). The Emergence of the Child as Grammarian. In: Appel, M.H., Goldberg, L.S. (eds) Topics in Cognitive Development. Topicsin Cognitive Development. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-4175-8_8
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