Early bilingualism is associated with advantages in metalinguistic awareness, which is the speaker's ability to distance himself from the content of speech in order to pay attention to the structural features of language and the language's properties as an object. In this aspect, bilingual children often display greater facility than their monolingual peers, in tasks such as judging the grammaticality of semantically anomalous sentences or in identifying and explaining language contrasts. Results have also shown that bilinguals benefit from the exposure of both languages and show cross-linguistic influences on metalinguistic skills in two typologically similar languages, which use different orthographies.
