One of the first papers to link metalinguistic awareness with third language learning was written by Jacqueline Thomas and published in the book "Cognitive processing by bilinguals". This article investigates how the phenomenon of metalinguistic awareness has been conceptualised over the last 30 years of research and aims at demonstrating the relationship and significance of metalinguistic awareness to (early) multiple language learning. Word definition and its suitability for assessing both linguistic proficiency and metalinguistic awareness in multilingual children will be discussed as a fairly unknown approach in multilingualism research. The current study was carried out as part of a longitudinal large-scale study in the trilingual educational context of Ladin primary schools in South Tyrol, the northernmost province of Italy. According to the Ladin parithetical educational system pupils are taught in the three official languages German, Italian and the oldest language Ladin, a neo Latin, Rhaeto-Romance language. The results of the study indicate that not only did children aged eight and nine in the Ladin primary schools outperform the control group from a monolingually oriented German speaking school (with little exposure to Italian) in terms of formal and non-formal definitions but they also performed better with regard to their understanding of concrete and abstract terms, thereby falsifying Piaget's assumption that the correct use of abstract concepts would not be possible before middle-school age.
Ulrike Jessner (2026) studied this question.