title: Measuring Metasyntactic Abilities: On a Classification of Metasyntactic Tasks.
abstract: Researchers working on metasyntactic abilities (i.e., the metalinguistic ability associated with syntax) face the problem of defining and measuring them. Metasyntactic abilities is a multifaceted concept, which encompasses various types of behaviours, from being able to intentionally manipulate syntactic structures to being able to state syntactic rules, and the way in which it is defined and measured varies greatly from one study to another. The present paper proposes a theoretically informed classification of syntax related tasks. The first part presents previous research defining and distinguishing various types of syntactic and metasyntactic abilities and their interrelations. In the second part, commonly used tasks are described and analyzed in terms of the framework presented, with the aim of better pinpointing the type of ability measured by each task. Ultimately, with this analysis of commonly used tasks, we hope to offer criteria for discriminating between the various measures of metasyntactic abilities.
authors: Département de linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre Ville, Montreal, H3C 3P8, Canada. simard.daphnee@uqam.ca.
authors: Daphnée
authors: D
authors: Simard
authors: Département de linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre Ville, Montreal, H3C 3P8, Canada.
authors: Marie
authors: M
authors: Labelle
authors: Département de linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succursale Centre Ville, Montreal, H3C 3P8, Canada.
authors: Annie
authors: A
authors: Bergeron
mesh_terms: D001076:Aptitude; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D000067489:Metacognition; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics
keywords: First language acquisition; Metalinguistic ability; Psycholinguistics; Second language acquisition