Review of Research: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students with Autism

Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching

“…Interventions and procedures (like EMT) evaluated with non-Hispanic participants should not be assumed effective with this population (e.g., Lang et al, 2011 ;Rispoli et al, 2011 ). Given the paucity of language intervention research with this population and a call for increased efforts to validate interventions to meet the needs of families from diverse cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds (Machalicek, Lang, & Raulston, 2015 ), it is imperative that interventions like EMT be tested to determine if they are sensitive to the cultural and linguistic diversity of Hispanic children with ASD (Rodriguez, 2009 ). The authors have recently submitted an application for a federal grant to investigate the effects of EMT with Spanishspeaking Hispanic parents and their children who have been diagnosed with ASD as a fi rst step in understanding if EMT is effective, culturally sensitive and socially valid with this population.…”

Service access experiences of immigrant and refugee caregivers of autistic children in Canada: A scoping review

“…While service accessibility and navigation challenges are common for caregivers of all backgrounds, newcomers (i.e., immigrants and refugees) face compounded difficulties, given their unique experiences. For instance, a family's culture can impact their view of disability, which may be different from the dominant norms within the host society [9][10][11]. Further, caregivers may be unaware of or uneducated about autism, and their cultural understandings of autism may influence service-seeking and treatment decisions [10].…”

“…Further, caregivers may be unaware of or uneducated about autism, and their cultural understandings of autism may influence service-seeking and treatment decisions [10]. Reviews conducted outside of Canada indicate that newcomers may face language barriers [9,11], fragmented services [9], difficult administrative processes [10], or a lack of providers [9]. These reviews also describe how evidence exists of delayed autism diagnosis among ethnic minorities [10], as well as that culturally and linguistically diverse families also face a greater risk of not obtaining early intervention services [9].…”

“…Reviews conducted outside of Canada indicate that newcomers may face language barriers [9,11], fragmented services [9], difficult administrative processes [10], or a lack of providers [9]. These reviews also describe how evidence exists of delayed autism diagnosis among ethnic minorities [10], as well as that culturally and linguistically diverse families also face a greater risk of not obtaining early intervention services [9]. Newcomers overall may also lack familial support after immigrating [12].…”

“…The purpose of this scoping review was to describe the available research on the experiences of Canadian newcomer caregivers of autistic children with respect to navigating and accessing autism-related services, and to identify research gaps. Existing reviews on the experiences of immigrant or refugee caregivers are based in the United States (e.g., [9,11]), are not focussed solely on Canadian research (e.g., [10]), or focus broadly on caregivers of all disabled children (e.g., [12]). Our intention with this review was to provide a summary of the literature that can be used in emerging policy work promoting health equity in autism services in Canada (e.g., [26]) and other countries with growing newcomer populations, and to inform future research including methodology.…”