|
Children with autism spectrum disorders often have
troubles communicating and developing language
skills. Parents are often told to focus on speaking
and teaching just one language to their child.
Teaching more than one language to children with
autism is typically discouraged. On the eve of World
Autism Awareness Day on April 2, Stefka
Marinova-Todd, associate professor at UBC’s School
of Audiology and Speech Sciences and director of
UBC’s Centre for Intercultural Language Studies,
debunks the perception that bilingualism hampers
language development in children with autism.
Several years ago there were no other published
studies on bilingual children with autism spectrum
disorders (ASD), so Stefka Marinova-Todd and theri
colleagues began with a small-scale study that
compared the vocabulary size of Chinese-English
bilingual children with ASD and children with ASD
who spoke only English (known as monolingual).
They chose to focus on vocabulary size because it’s
considered to be an accurate representation of
language development and they found that bilingual
children with ASD acquire vocabularies that are just
as rich as monolingual children with ASD, indicating
that bilingualism does not have a negative effect on
the language development of children with autism.
Today, as a result of this work, clinicians are
increasingly less likely to recommend that families
of bilingual children with ASD should stop speaking
more than one language – something that was the
predominate advice only a few years ago!
It is important for future speech-language
therapists to know that bilingualism is not
detrimental to the language development of children
with language delay and/or disorders. In fact,
imposed monolingualism is much more likely to have
negative effects on these children’s language
development and socialization.
Today, there are far more bilingual and multilingual
individuals around the world than monolingual, and
these numbers are constantly growing. This means
that the number of bilingual patients and clients in
clinical settings is constantly growing as well.
Researchers are now working on another project that
will push the boundaries a bit further and examine
whether bilingual children with autism experience
cognitive advantages. This phenomenon, a bilingual
brain boost so to speak – has been reported in
children who don’t have developmental disabilities.
The results are still to come but it could be that
children with autism raised bilingually experience
added benefits as well.
For more information
The
University of British Columbia
MDN |