The Impact of Bilingualism on Conversational Understanding in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Background:  Bilingual families who have children with autism are often advised to use only English and not the primary language with their children in order to avoid further confusion. However, to date there is no research to support this belief. In fact, several recent studies show that bilingualism does not have a detrimental impact on language development in young children with autism. Moreover, it has been shown that bilingualism contributes to the ability to detect conversational faux-pas in typically-developing children. While conversational understanding has been studied extensively in monolingual English-speaking children with autism, to date there has been no studies examining conversational understanding in bilingual adolescents with autism.

Objectives: The purpose of the present research is to fill this gap by examining conversational understanding in three monolingual English-speaking and three bilingual English-French-speaking adolescents with autism.

Methods:  To examine conversational understanding, we asked a speech and language pathologist to administer a standardized pragmatic test where our participants were first asked to identify utterances that violated conversational rules and then to provide explanations for their answers. The obtained data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. First, we analyzed the answers provided by our participants quantitatively. We then asked three independent raters to analyze the explanations provided by our participants.

Results:  The results of our study show that bilingualism does not have a negative impact on the ability of adolescents with autism to detect conversational faux-pas. More specifically, we found that bilingual participants with autism examined in our study were able to detect violations of conversational rules at the same success rate as their monolingual peers with autism. Moreover, our study showed that our bilingual participants with autism were able to provide better explanations for their answers than their monolingual peers.

Conclusions: We hypothesize that a daily exposure of our bilingual participants to a richer linguistic environment could contribute to the development of more advanced linguistic, cognitive and social skills. The information provided in this study can be used to better support the needs of bilingual families who have children with autism.