Bilingualism in School-Aged Children with ASD: A Pilot Study.
Bilingual school-aged kids with ASD keep up with monolingual peers, so keep both languages in therapy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Giesbers et al. (2020) watched a small group of school-aged children with ASD. Some kids heard two languages every day. Others heard only English.
The team used cluster analysis to see if the bilingual kids lagged behind in language. They compared scores to both monolingual ASD and neurotypical peers.
What they found
No meaningful language gaps showed up. Bilingual and monolingual children with ASD scored about the same.
Typical peers also looked alike no matter how many languages they heard.
How this fits with other research
Mas et al. (2019) saw the same pattern one year earlier. Their bilingual school-age kids kept pace on vocabulary and lagged only a hair on grammar.
Skrimpa et al. (2022) even found a tiny plus. Bilingual autistic children solved pronoun tasks slightly better than monolingual peers.
Cappadocia et al. (2012) and Griffith et al. (2012) already showed the same null result in preschoolers. The new study simply stretches the safe verdict up to elementary and middle-school years.
Why it matters
You can reassure families that speaking two languages at home will not slow language growth. Keep goals in both languages when parents value them. If a child loves a heritage language, use it in play or instruction to boost engagement. No need to pick one tongue over another.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Preschool-aged bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can keep pace with their monolingual peers with ASD. However, can older children with ASD continue to do so as language demands become greater? Also, can they reach language levels similar to those of neurotypically developing (ND) bilingual children? The current study compares the language abilities of 3 school-aged bilingual children with ASD to those of 2 monolingual peers, and 19 ND bilingual and 12 ND monolingual peers. Using cluster analyses, we found that bilingual children with ASD had similar language to those of monolingual children with ASD and neurotypically developing bilingual and monolingual children. Results suggest that bilingual children with ASD can keep pace with their peers with similar intellectual abilities.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s10803-020-04501-8