Comparing bilingual autistic and neurotypical children

What is it about?

Monolingual autistic children show diverse linguistic profiles in the school years, ranging from low verbal to normalized language development. Much less is known about the English second language profiles of school-age bilingual autistic children. We compared the English vocabularies of bilingual autistic children and their neurotypical bilingual peers in order to determine (1) the range of their vocabulary abilities, and (2) to what extend they overlapped with the neurotypical children. We found that the majority of the bilingual autistic children had vocabulary abilities within the range defined by their neurotypical peers. A minority of autistic children lagged behind.

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Why is it important?

This comparison is important because many parents and professionals believe that bilingualism would be a source of language delays in autistic children. In contrast to this belief, our findings showed that autistic bilinguals are not necessarily lagging behind neurotypical bilingual peers the same age, and that the diverse linguistic profiles of autistic children emerge in their second language as well as in their first language. Professionals like speech-language pathologists should not discourage bilingual development in autistic children.