Disentangling Language Disorder and Bilingualism in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Writing

Abstract

Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children’s expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation. The evidence speaks in favor of distinct patterns of writing impairment across the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

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.…”

“…Two studies reported that bilingual children with ASD had an advantage with respect to narrative ability (e.g., micro- and macro-structure in storytelling) and socialization skills [ 38 , 40 ]. However, bilinguals with ASD were reported to face difficulties in punctuation, unlike bilinguals with DLD [ 37 ].…”

“…[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.…”

Reading comprehension differences between children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and low cognitive abilities and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and intact cognitive skills: the roles of decoding, fluency and morphosyntax

“…Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition marked by challenges in various domains ranging from children’s social and communication skills to their cognitive and language abilities. Especially language ability varies widely for children with ASD ( Tager-Flusberg et al, 2005 ; Peristeri et al, 2017 ; Andreou et al, 2020 ) with pragmatic language difficulties (i.e., language use in context) being a hallmark feature even for high-functioning children whose IQ lies in the average range ( Baron-Cohen, 1988 ; Peppé et al, 2006 ; Lam and Yeung, 2012 ; Andreou and Skrimpa, 2020 ; Peristeri and Tsimpli, 2022 ; Lampri et al, 2023 ). Among verbally-able children with ASD, language difficulties have been reported to have a cascading negative effect on children’s academic success leading to underachievement as compared to typically-developing (TD) peers.…”

Reading and Writing Skills in Developmental Language Disorder: Parental Perception

“…the words responsible for syntactic structuring (function words) and derivative and inflectional elements. Ortography mistakes are also very common in writing in DLD compared to their peers in mental age or even compared to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Peristeri, & Tsimpli, 2022).…”