The purposes of this study were to determine (1) whether there is a developmental sequence in children's acquisition of metalinguistic abilities and (2) whether the acquisition of these abilities is related to Piagetian operations. Word awareness served as the measure of metalinguistic ability. An attempt was also made to determine whether the emergence of word awareness could be shown to follow a theoretically postulate sequence. Items were constructed on the assumption that word awareness proceeds according to predictable principles and included words in an unstructured list, the addition of words to sentences that already form a semantic whole, and the addition of a word which changed the grammatical structure of the sentence. Fifty kindergarten and 50 first grade children were tested on word awareness, seriation tasks, riddles, reading readiness, reading achievement, and IQ. Findings showed a rapid increase in word awareness at about age six and substantiated the theoretically predicted order of difficulty of the item types. Results also corroborated previous findings which showed that neither seriation operations nor metalinguistic abilities appear before age five for most children. Findings suggested that most children acquire linguistic skills prior to cognitive ones. (HOD)