Resumen de Exploring the contribution of phonological memory to metasyntactic abilities in bilingual children

Véronique Fortier, Daphnée Simard

• The contribution of phonological memory to syntactic abilities has been demonstrated in various populations, but its relationship to metasyntactic abilities, defined as the ability to control syntactic aspects of language, remains largely unexplored. This study therefore aims to examine the contribution of phonological memory in the completion of two metasyntactic tasks: an ungrammatical sentence repetition and an error replication task. Eighty-three bilingual children (Mage = 10.5) completed the two metasyntactic tasks as well as tasks meant to control for lexical knowledge and syntactic abilities. A nonword repetition task measured phonological memory. Contrary to theoretical arguments which suggest that completion of both these tasks demonstrates the effect of phonological memory on metasyntactic abilities, the results show that phonological memory contributes significantly to metasyntactic abilities, only when measured by the repetition of ungrammatical sentences. Results suggest that different metasyntactic tasks rely differently on underlying linguistic and cognitive abilities.