The Impact of Bilingual Environments on Language Development in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

The impact of bilingual exposure on language learning has not been systematically studied in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. This study compared the social abilities and language levels of children (mean age = 56 months) with ASDs from bilingual (n = 45) and monolingual (n = 30) environments. Bilingually-exposed children were subgrouped based on simultaneous bilingual exposure from infancy (SIM, n = 24) versus sequential post-infancy bilingual exposure (SEQ, n = 21). Despite significantly different amounts of bilingual exposure across all groups (p = <0.001) and significantly stronger social interaction scores in the SIM group compared to the SEQ group on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-II Interpersonal subdomain (p = 0.025), there were no significant group differences in language level. Bilingually-exposed children with ASDs did not experience additional delays in language development.

Information and Impression Regarding ASD Questionnaire Answered by Foreigners Living in Brazil

“…Other studies investigating language aspects of autistic children in bilingual [20][21][22][23], multicultural environments [24,25], speciically with minority groups [26], of immigrants [27] reported aspects like those observed in this study. One study [10] was found that involved research into autism awareness and knowledge about autism speciically in foreigners.…”

Brief Report: An Exploratory Study of Lexical Skills in Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Nonetheless, child development professionals frequently advise bilingual families to speak only one language to their child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (e.g., KremerSadlik 2005;Leadbitter et al 2009). Many parents and professionals believe that bilingual exposure negatively affects language development, especially for children with ASD (Hambly and Fombonne 2009), despite a dearth of research evidence that supports this belief.…”

“…However, all of the available research, including poster presentation data from recent conferences (Hambly and Fombonne 2009;Leadbitter et al 2009;ValicentiMcDermott et al 2008), suggests that there is no negative impact of bilingualism on language development in children with ASD. Therefore, a more in-depth description of early language development in bilingual children with ASD, with a focus on lexical skills in particular, is required, as lexical skills are considered to be a reliable predictor of language development in children with ASD (Condouris et al 2003).…”

“…The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate the lexical skills of monolingual and bilingual children with ASD, using methods similar to those commonly used with typically-developing bilingual children (e.g., Pearson et al 1993;Thordardottir et al 2006) and with bilingual children with ASD (Hambly and Fombonne 2009). It was hypothesized that the monolingual and bilingual children would have conceptual production vocabularies that were not significantly different in size, and that the comprehension vocabularies and language scores of the bilingual children would not be significantly smaller than those of the monolinguals.…”

Raising children bilingually

“…Although "there is no experiment, let alone group of experiments, that can definitively answer whether bilingualism is beneficial for children with autism", the author argues (p. 213) that the information available can shed light on decision making on the part of professionals and families. Specifically, Hambly and Fombonne (2012) found that preschool children raised as bilinguals in French-English (simultaneous and sequential) had comparable language skills compared to a control group exposed to one language only. Petersen, Marinova-Todd, and Mirenda (2012) reported that there were no differences between bilingual children (Chinese-English) with ASD and monolingual peers (English) in conceptual, receptive and expressive vocabulary between the two groups in English.…”