The study explores the effects of the relationship between exposure to two languages inchildhood and metalinguistic abilities. Arabic-speaking children who had been exposed to bothspoken and literary Arabic were compared to Russian–Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrewmonolinguals. All of the children were in kindergarten or first grade. The tests included languagearbitrariness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary. As compared to the Hebrew monolinguals,the Russian–Hebrew bilinguals revealed the following pattern: higher performance onarbitrariness and phonological awareness tasks and lower performance on the vocabularymeasure. The results of the Arab children mimicked those of the Russian–Hebrewbilinguals and differed from those of the Hebrew monolinguals. We conclude that exposure toliterary Arabic requires the same intensive language analyses as those demanded of childrenexposed to languages as different as Russian and Hebrew.