The relation between metalinguistic ability, social metacognition and reading: A developmental study

This study examined the relation between metalinguistic ability, social metacognition, linguistic and general ability prior to the commencement of reading and 6 months after school entry. Forty-eight children between the ages of 4.3 and 4.9 years from several preschools in Wellington, New Zealand participated in the first part of this study and 42 were subsequently retested one year later. Children were administered the block design and vocabulary subtests from the WIPPSI, a test of print awareness, a rhyme task, a syllable segmentation task, and a false-belief task in two separate 20-minute sessions at the preschool. The Burt Word Reading Test, and a phonemic segmentation task were also included at retesting. Results showed, on the whole, a pattern of significant relationships among various meta-abilities at preschool and that most were correlated with general ability. One year later, with the advent of reading instruction, only phonemic segmentation and print awareness were significantly related. The best predictor of later reading;achievement was syllable segmentation taken at preschool, while contemporaneous correlates were measures of phonemic segmentation and print awareness. These results support a view of the development of metacognition that is domain-general and based on an underlying cognitive capacity. Particular rather than general metalinguistic abilities are related to reading ability, and these change over time.