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Brief Report: Vocabulary and Grammatical Skills of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders at School Age

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Abstract

We examined the lexical and grammatical skills of monolingual and bilingual school-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Thirteen monolingual and thirteen bilingual children with ASD without intellectual disability, were compared on standardized measures of vocabulary and morphology. Findings revealed that bilingual children performed in the average monolingual range on a standardized receptive vocabulary test and slightly below the average range on a standardized morphological task in their dominant language. Prior work indicates that bilingual exposure is not detrimental for early language development in children with autism. The current findings suggest that at school age, bilinguals with ASD show similar language development patterns as those described in the literature on typically-developing bilinguals.

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. The term dominant language is also used for monolingual children given that some of these children had minimal exposure to a second language as described in Table 4. Monolingual children can be considered as functional monolinguals, who can only function in one language.

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Acknowledgments

This study was part of the first author’s doctoral dissertation. We would like to thank the families who participated in the study. We acknowledge the contributions of many research assistants to testing and data coding: Bethsheba Ananng, Chloe Benson, Stefanie Cortina, Laura Khalil, Edwige Lafortune, Sarya Majdalani, Mrinalini Ramesh, Andrea Rezendes, Cynthia Santacroce, Marie-Hélène Tcheuffa-Kamo, and Leah Terrini. We would like to thank Dr. Elin Thordardottir and Dr. Fred Genesee for their input.

Funding

This project was funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Fonds de Recherche du Quebec-Societe et Culture (Grant No. 174503) and a doctoral fellowship by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant No. 752-2013-1889) to Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, 2001 McGill College, 8th Floor, Montreal, H3A 1G1, Canada

    Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero & Aparna Nadig

  2. Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM), Montreal, Canada

    Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero & Aparna Nadig

Authors
  1. Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero
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  2. Aparna Nadig
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Contributions

AMGB conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, participated in the measurement, performed statistical analyses and interpretation of the data, and drafted the manuscript; AN participated in the design of the study, interpretation of the data, and drafted the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Gonzalez-Barrero, A.M., Nadig, A. Brief Report: Vocabulary and Grammatical Skills of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders at School Age. J Autism Dev Disord 49, 3888–3897 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04073-2

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