This special issue of the «Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata/Journal of Applied Psycholinguistics» addresses a topic that combines two different research areas, each of which has received significant attention in the past five decades, taken separately, but very scarce attention, if ever, in combination. When we address Meta Linguistic Awareness (MLA) in bimodal bilingualism we are faced with a series of theoretical and operational issues such as: how can we de ne MLA in sign language? To what extent the technical aspects of this definition are borrowed from spoken language categories, and to what extent this definition draws on sign languages' own structural features? How is the conception of MLA in sign language currently evolving and how is this evolution related to the attempts at finding a writing system for sign languages? Which indicators of MLA in sign language can be considered as relevant, and how can a plurality of such indicators be combined into MLA assessment tools comparable to those we use for assessing MLA in spoken languages? Does MLA in bimodal bilinguals develop in both their languages, signed and spoken? Can we find metalinguistic benefits associated to this type of bilingualism, and are these comparable to those associated to unimodal bilingualism as measured in spoken languages? How do bimodal interpreters cope with those metalinguistic aspects that inevitably emerge when translating into and from a sign language and even more with metalinguistic terminology when their task is precisely to translate this terminology? What kind of difficulties bimodal bilingual children encounter in the acquisition of reading and writing skills in spoken language, a process that highly relies on MLA and at the same time stimulates it? This special issue has addressed some of these theoretical and research questions.
