Throughout this book, it appeared that the metalinguistic dimension implies higher-order processes that enable us to take language at a distance and focus on form/meanings relationships. As language is constructed in such a way that minimal changes in form may entail dramatic changes in meaning, the attention to form has a vital adaptive value, hence the usefulness of a “meta” level, that of MLA, precisely. In the first section, we saw that since the earliest phases of language acquisition, children do pay attention to those minimal changes because they soon realize that a final ending of a name or a verb, the use of a given pronoun instead of another in a sentence has practical consequences on their behavior or the others’ behavior. A plural form of a name might mean a plurality of objects to eat or play with, to receive or give, or simply many activities to implement instead of a single activity. Likewise, the use of “she” instead of “he” or “I” instead of “we” might mean a contrastive reference to a sister versus a brother, a contrastive reference the adult makes to him/herself as opposed to a group of people, etc. The child’s ear is even more stimulated to pay attention to the final parts of words in languages that are morphologically more complex than English, such as Romance languages. In this case, for instance, gender is nearly always marked, at both the singular and plural levels, and requires the agreement of the article, the pronoun, and other neighboring words. For instance, in the Spanish expressions: “Él es mi mejor amigo” versus “Ella es mi mejora amiga”, the masculine/feminine distinction applies to the pronoun, the adjective, and the noun, while in the corresponding English expressions, “He/she is my best friend”, only the pronoun changes.