This study was designed to investigate the role of literacy in metalinguistic development. Twenty-five adults (5 illiterate, 7 in an intermediate level of literacy and 13 in a advanced level) participated in this study. The adults were tested in several syntactic and phonological awareness tasks. Results of non-parametric Analysis of Variance showed that illiterate adults had overall worse performance than the literate ones. There was little difference between the literate groups. The results suggest that literacy have an effect in metalinguistic awareness development.
literacy; syntactic awareness; metalinguistic development