Bilingualism effects in pronoun comprehension: Evidence from children with autism

Abstract

The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age‐matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers. The findings suggest that bilingualism is not detrimental to autistic children's pronoun resolution skills. The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns.

Assessing the Impact of Bilingualism on the Linguistic Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Greece: A Scoping Review

“…Of all the screened studies, four were conducted in Greece with Greek–Albanian bilinguals with ASD. Specifically, for bilingual children with ASD, three studies recruited only Greek–Albanian bilinguals [ 37 , 38 , 39 ], while only one study recruited bilinguals of other language pairs [ 40 ]. The total number of bilingual children with ASD was 97 across the studies reviewed.…”

“…[45] Language screening for narrative ability Greece (ten = Albanian-, three = English-, two = Russian-, two = Swedish-, two = German-, and one = Ukrainian-speaking) Another difference between studies was that the experimental groups in Peristeri et al [40] involved different mother tongues, such as speakers of Albanian, English, Russian, Swedish, German, and Ukrainian. In contrast, the other studies [37][38][39] involved only Greek-Albanian speakers.…”

Bilingual exposure might enhance L1 development in Cantonese–English bilingual autistic children: Evidence from the production of focus

“…Our findings provide new empirical evidence that bilingual autistic children exposed to two typologically different and genetically divergent languages would not experience additional language difficulties in the production of focus compared to monolingual autistic peers. Second, our study is one of the very few that examined the impact of bilingual exposure on specific linguistic structures and the use of different linguistic strategies in experimental settings where confounding factors such as language ability, nonverbal IQ and working memory are adequately controlled (also see Meir & Novogrodsky, 2023; Skrimpa et al, 2022), apart from standardized language assessments. Our results highlight the importance of combining both approaches in measuring bilingualism effects on the language development of autistic children.…”

“…To date, only two recent studies have investigated the performance of specific language structures in bilingual autistic children (Meir & Novogrodsky, 2023; Skrimpa et al, 2022). Using a picture verification task, Skrimpa et al (2022) investigated the effects of bilingualism on pronoun comprehension in Greek-Albanian bilingual autistic children. In an elicitation task, Meir and Novogrodsky (2023) evaluated the bilingualism effects on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions in Russian-Hebrew bilingual autistic children.…”

“…The bilingualism effects on specific linguistic constructions of autistic children have not been systematically studied with well-designed experiments. To date, only two recent studies have investigated the performance of specific language structures in bilingual autistic children (Meir & Novogrodsky, 2023; Skrimpa et al, 2022). Using a picture verification task, Skrimpa et al (2022) investigated the effects of bilingualism on pronoun comprehension in Greek-Albanian bilingual autistic children.…”