Language of Intervention in Bilingual Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Selecting the appropriate language of intervention for bilingual children with language impairment is difficult, especially for bilingual children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as their families are often encouraged by professionals to select one language only for communication. The limited evidence supports the use of bilingual language interventions when working with bilingual children with ASD. The current study sought to expand this limited work by presenting preliminary data of the effects of a bilingual and monolingual treatment condition on the language skills of two bilingual children with ASD (ages 3 and 5) using an alternating treatment, single-subject design. The two treatment conditions, a monolingual English condition and a bilingual English/Spanish condition, were alternated across 14 treatment sessions. Both participants improved in each condition. The treatment conditions were highly effective for one participant and minimally effective for the other participant. Within each participant, effect sizes were similar across the two treatment conditions. There were differences in the maintenance patterns of the two participants. These results support the available evidence that bilingual treatments do not have negative effects on bilingual children with ASD.

Bilingual Versus Monolingual Vocabulary Instruction for Bilingual Children with Hearing Loss

“…Thordardottir, Weismer, and Smith (1997) reported a "slight advantage" of the bilingual condition relative to the monolingual condition in an adapted alternating treatments single case research design study with a child with language impairment. No signs of an inhibitory effect of bilingual instruction on English performance were reported in this study or in a similar study conducted with children with ASD who were bilingual (Summers, Smith, Mueller, Alexander, & Muzza, 2017). It is unknown the degree to which the findings from children with typical hearing apply to children with hearing loss, and more specifically to children with hearing loss who are bilingual.…”

Systematic Review of English Early Literacy Interventions for Children Who Are Dual Language Learners

“…Among the 11 studies that included children who were DLLs who also had delays or disabilities, four studies (Gutiérrez-Clellen et al, 2012; Simon-Cereijido & Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2014; Spencer et al, 2019; Thordardottir et al, 1997) conducted assessments to identify children with delays or disabilities in the children’s home language, three studies conducted assessments in English (Spencer et al, 2013; Spencer & Slocum, 2010; Weddle et al, 2016), and one study conducted assessments in both languages (Restrepo et al, 2013). Three studies did not report the language used to conduct the assessment (Landry et al, 2019; McDaniel et al, 2019; Summers et al, 2017).…”

“…Three studies used an alternating treatments design to compare differences between delivery of intervention using bilingual instruction versus English instruction on children’s expressive language skills (McDaniel et al, 2019; Summers et al, 2017; Thordardottir et al, 1997). In two studies, no differences were found between delivering intervention using bilingual instruction alternating with English instruction on expressive vocabulary (McDaniel et al, 2019) or making requests (Summers et al, 2017). Thordardottir et al (1997) reported bilingual instruction was more effective than English instruction in teaching children to label home-related vocabulary.…”

“…In six studies (24%), children who were DLLs were characterized less clearly. In five of the 25 studies, researchers specified the level of home language or English exposure at home (e.g., more Spanish than English, more English than Spanish; Landry et al, 2019;Méndez et al, 2015Méndez et al, , 2018Spencer et al, 2013;Summers et al, 2017). In 24% (6 of 25) of the studies, researchers reported if the participating children were sequential DLLs or simultaneous DLLs.…”

“…In regard to expressive vocabulary skills, one study did not find noteworthy effects favoring the experimental condition (d = 0.04, Landry et al, 2019). One study (Restrepo et al, 2013) Seven SCED studies (McDaniel et al, 2019;Spencer et al, 2013Spencer et al, , 2019Spencer & Slocum, 2010;Summers et al, 2017;Thordardottir et al, 1997;Weddle et al, 2016) included children with or at risk for disabilities. As reported above, findings with respect to children who were DLLs, who had identified risks or disabilities, and participated in the SCED studies with varying forms of literacy instruction generally showed functional relations between the literacy instruction and increases in children's English oral language skills.…”