Bilingual Language Development in Children with ASD

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can become bilingual however, when  children receive the diagnosis of ASD, professionals in the fields of healthcare and  education often recommend that minority language parents refrain from using their  minority language and instead speak only the majority language with their child. Such recommendations are based on the belief that deficits often reported in children with ASD, such as attending to others and difficulty with phonology, will make the acquisition of two languages difficult. However, such recommendations are not supported by current evidence. 

We aim to better understand how the bilingual experience impacts language acquisition in these children and examine whether there are differences in language learning between monolingual children with ASD and their bilingual peers. We predict that bilingual and monolingual children with ASD will have formal language abilities similar to those of their bilingual and monolingual neurotypical peers. We also predict that while neurotypical children will have better performances on the narrative tasks than their peers with ASD, bilingual children with ASD will outperform their monolingual peers with ASD given their improved socio-pragmatic skills.