Complex interactions in the multilingual mind: Assessing metalinguistic abilities and their effects on decoding a new language system in trilingual learners

Originally, scholarly discussions of metalinguistic awareness (MeLA), as a distinct concept, primarily focused on monolinguals. However, increasing scientific attention has more recently been paid to multiple language learning, which poses new challenges in this area of linguistic-cognitive research. This article first discusses a holistic and dynamic view of multilingual development and portrays MeLA as an emergent property of multilingual systems that varies in quality for multilinguals. Thereafter, a longitudinal study investigates the development of MeLA in three languages among adolescent learners in South Tyrol. For this purpose, a metalinguistic awareness test battery was specifically tailored to the trilingual situation. Subsequently, the effects of MeLA on decoding a new language system unknown to the learners were explored. The results from Part I of the study show that most learners developed MeLA skills that improved to varying degrees within the testing period. In addition, significant positive correlations were found between the MeLA test results for most participants. Analysing Part II of the study showed that, on average, participants with higher MeLA test scores could more frequently activate their prior linguistic knowledge, and they exhibited higher levels of awareness when decoding the new language system than did participants with lower MeLA scores. These findings show the interconnectedness of metacognitive skills and confirm the catalytic role of MeLA in multilingual systems, which calls for more cross-curricular multilingual teaching approaches that promote MeLA, particularly in multilingual regions such as South Tyrol.