Language-developmental trajectory in autism

Abstract

Prevost & Tuller (2022, henceforth P&T) present an interesting and much needed scoping review on bilingual language development and autism, putting its finger on several important issues and shortcomings in studies on (monolingual and bilingual) language (development) and autism. In this response to P&T we touch on several topics that have recently inspired discussions in our Languagein-Autism (LiA) lab in Amsterdam, including language-developmental trajectory in relation to data collection, social communication, statistical learning, and autistic traits. Data collectionP&T argue that bilingual development in autistic children 1 is different from typically developing (TD) children. We believe monolingual development is different in autistic children as well. For example, the fact that there are no age effects regarding several morphosyntactic and pragmatic phenomena in a group of 6-14-year-old monolingual Dutch-speaking autistic children (Schaeffer, 2021) indicates a language-developmental difference in comparison to TD children.Furthermore, even in cases in which autistic children's experimental language scores do not differ from their TD peers' , it might be that the processes leading to their responses are different. In fact, autistic individuals without intellectual disability are often particularly good at controlled lab tests, while it is not clear