METALINGUISTIC AWARENESS OF RUSSIAN-HEBREW BILINGUAL PRESCHOOLERS (BASED ON THE DEFINITION TEST)

Abstract

Our study of Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers’ metalinguistic awareness is based on the results of the definition test with 56 children. The results uncover six strategies to generate a definition of concrete nouns in two languages. The preschoolers preferred to how an object functions while explaining the word meaning in both languages. References to the category by hypernyms, synonyms or co-hyponyms cover 10% of Russian definitions and 5% of those in Hebrew. The bilinguals often failed to define a noun in Hebrew. They could not find a relevant hypernym, overcoming the difficulty by generating descriptive definitions with a specific qualification of the object. Manipulating the L2 structure, they showed their metalinguistic awareness.