尽管双语经历可能会通过一些途径——例如跨语言迁移或者第二语言教学等——对儿童的语言发展产生影响，但是研究双语经历本身对于语言发展产生的影响也是同样重要的。全世界有许多母语为汉语的儿童都掌握并使用一门第二语言，而这门语言往往与汉语语言系统有很大的差异，这为双语研究提供了大量的研究依据与空间。

在语言加工过程中，双语儿童对于语言结构敏感度的优势是否可以扩展到构词以及句法领域中？在人工句法学习过程中，双语儿童与单语儿童存在哪些差异？本研究给出了一部分解答：

（1）双语经历有助于双语儿童比较不同语言的结构属性，从而能够更理解或者掌握语言结构。

（2）双语被试在人造句法习得方面有更好的测试表现。在本实验中，更完善的实验设计进一步提供了更可靠的有关双语儿童在语言加工方面具有优势的证据。

本文中提及的两个实验同样也具有局限性，需要我们在未来的实验研究中注意：

第一，由于时间方面的限制，被试儿童的语言流利水平并没有得到系统地评估。然而，由于这些实验中用到的语言结构或是显著存在于双语儿童的第二语言中，或是不存在于两种语言中，语言流利水平数据的缺乏应不会像其他双语实验研究中一样影响到实验结果。在实验1中，用于检测的语言结构是一个英语词语，而英语是单语儿童的母语也是双语儿童的主要语言。以往的研究已经多次证实，双语儿童在语言流利程度上反而落后于单语儿童（例如，Bialystok，McBride-Chang & Luk，2005；Oller & Eilers，2002）。因此，我们有理由推断，中英双语儿童的英文流利水平最多会与英文单语儿童的水平一致，若存在任何差异，应该也是单语儿童占有优势。

实验2关注非英语或汉语的人造句法习得，儿童的英语和汉语语言流利水平对实验结果的比较应该不会产生直接影响。然而，以往研究已经证实，双语流利程度对于认知和语言能力发展的重要性（Bialystok，McBride-Chang & Luk，2005），所以语言流利水平数据的收集让我们更全面地了解双语的作用。

第二，除了双语儿童的双语流利程度，儿童年龄也有可能会影响到双语儿童的语言能力（Bialystok，2001）。在以往实验中，检测到的双语优势在儿童进入一年级时就会消失（例如，Bruck & Genesee，1995；Chen et al.，2004）。而在本章所报告的实验中，儿童均为小学三年级学生，这个年龄已经超出了以往实验中被试儿童的年龄。这种差异可能是由于测试方式或者检测目标语言知识层面的差异造成的。一项同时关注语音、构词和句法加工的发展性跨学科研究显示，年龄对于双语研究的影响值得重视。有关早期双语语言能力更为广泛的解释同样值得期待。

摘要Abstract

Psychologists have long been interested in the impact of early bilingualism on children’s cognitive development.However, despite vigorous investigation into the topic, research on the effect of bilingualism on metalinguistic awareness and language processing has remained largely unexplored, either producing mixed findings or revealing advantages that cannot be ascribed solely to bilingualism perse.Many Chinese-speaking children around the world speak a second language, usually one that is typologically distant from Chinese, which affords an opportunity for isolating extraneous factors and identifying effect of bilingualism perse and provides a fertile ground for studying theories of early bilingualism in a broader cross-linguistic context.The purpose of this chapter is two-fold.First, it provides a critical review of the conceptual and methodological challenges in conducting research on the metalinguistic development and language processing of bilingual children.Second, it reports two empirical studies with Chinese-speaking bilingual children that were designed to investigate structural sensitivity theory (Kuo& Anderson, 2010), an augmented theoretical framework to examine bilingual cognitive advantage in the verbal domain.

key words

Bilingualism, Chinese, Metalinguistic, Language Processing

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[1] 美国德克萨斯A&M大学（Texas A&M University）

[2] 美国德克萨斯A&M大学（Texas A&M University）

[3] 美国德克萨斯A&M大学（Texas A&M University）

[4] 完整的学习列表可以在相关参考文献文章（Saffran，2002）的附录一中找到。

[5] 本文所述研究，使用的完整测试内容清单可以在相关参考文献文章（Saffran，2002）的附录二中找到。