Studies into the influence of bilingualism on the acquisition of additional languages have shown that in most cases, bilinguals have advantages over monolinguals, and these differences have been
attributed to the bilinguals’ enhanced metalinguistic awareness. However, the association between the development of metalinguistic awareness and additional language learning has rarely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. Such evidence is urgently needed in light of recent developments in (foreign) language policy-making in Europe and worldwide, which envisages raising metalinguistic awareness and skills as an essential part of linguistically and culturally appropriate teaching in today’s language classrooms.

While there is considerable evidence that bilingual children, whose languages are relatively well-developed, show superiority in metalinguistic tasks that require selective attention to information, it remains under-researched how this cognitive ability shows in bilinguals of more diverse profiles, and to what extent it affects language learning outcomes. Researchers in the field have also
proposed that metalinguistic awareness may support language maintenance and guard against language attrition processes. However, research in this connection is also extremely scarce.

There is much variation in how previous studies have operationalized and tested different types and aspects of metalinguistic awareness; for both methodological and practical reasons, no comprehensive instrument exists yet. Metalinguistic awareness is further likely to develop over time as a function of a multilingual's language learning experience and should therefore be ideally tested longitudinally.

In this Research Topic, we aim to bring together recent scholarship on metalinguistic awareness in multilingual learners (three or more languages in their repertoire) to improve our understanding of
this complex cognitive construct and relatedly to identify suitable methods of testing it in multilingual learners of different profiles. We welcome review articles, data reports, opinion and positioning papers as well as empirical research papers that may involve behavioural as well as electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques, addressing, among other things, the following questions:
• To what extent does metalinguistic awareness affect multilinguals’ language learning and/or attrition?
• What is the relationship between the two and what are the mechanisms involved?
• Does metalinguistic awareness affect other aspects of human cognition beyond language learning?
• How can metalinguistic awareness be optimally measured in multilinguals of different age groups and over time?
• Are there interindividual differences in metalinguistic awareness across ages?

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Frontiers in Language Sciences

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