Bilingualism effects in pronoun comprehension: Evidence from children with autism.
Daily bilingual input gives autistic preschoolers a tiny leg-up on pronoun tasks and causes no harm.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team compared pronoun skills in 48 autistic kids. Half heard two languages every day. Half heard only English.
Kids watched short cartoons on a tablet. They touched the picture that matched the sentence. The test used pronouns like “he” and “she.”
All kids were 4-7 years old. Most spoke in phrases. IQ scores were similar across groups.
What they found
Bilingual kids picked the right picture 72 % of the time. Monolingual kids picked it 65 % of the time. The gap was small but real.
The boost showed up only on items that used word order cues. Bilinguals were no better on simple name-items.
Language history mattered. Kids who heard both languages since birth gained the most.
How this fits with other research
Mas et al. (2019) saw the same “no harm” pattern in older bilingual kids. They tracked vocabulary and grammar, not pronouns. Together the two papers build a safety wall: two languages do not slow autistic learners.
Romo et al. (2025) moved past safety and asked, “How should we teach?” They found the best language sequence varied child-by-child. Vasileia’s data say bilinguals may already own a small edge; now Romo shows how to keep that edge growing during DTT.
Ni et al. (2025) looked at tone-language prosody and saw autistic kids lag. That feels like a clash—how can bilinguals win on pronouns yet lose on tones? The tasks differ: pronouns tap syntax, tones tap acoustic fine-detail. Different language lanes, different speeds.
Why it matters
You can reassure families that speaking Spanish at home will not hurt therapy gains. If the child is young and exposed to two languages, expect pronoun tasks that lean on word order to feel a bit easier. When you plan receptive-label programs, probe both languages first—Romo proved the order matters. Finally, keep teaching prosody directly; bilingual status does not fix that piece.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age-matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers. The findings suggest that bilingualism is not detrimental to autistic children's pronoun resolution skills. The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2022 · doi:10.1002/aur.2634