Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Growing up in Bilingual Environments: A Look at Verbal Fluency

• In Event: Language and Literacy Outcomes of Neurotypical and Neurodiverse Children Growing up in Bilingual Environments

Abstract

Background: Verbal fluency tasks provide key information regarding individuals’ lexico-semantic and executive functioning skills (Shao et al., 2014). Prior research has found that neurotypical monolingual children and adults tend to outperform their bilingual peers on this task. Different hypotheses have been postulated to explain bilinguals’ lower performance (e.g., reduced vocabulary hypothesis, Bialystok et al., 2008). Of interest, monolingual individuals with ASD have been reported to show impairments in response initiation during verbal fluency tasks compared to their neurotypical peers (Carmo et al., 2017). However, only a few studies have examined the performance of bilingual children with ASD on verbal fluency tasks (Gonzalez-Barrero & Nadig, 2017). Crucially, verbal fluency taps into two challenging areas in ASD: language and executive functioning.

Objective: This study aims to better understand how bilingual children with ASD approach verbal fluency tasks to provide novel information on the linguistic and cognitive profile of these children.

Methods: Twenty-six school-aged children with ASD (13 monolinguals, 13 bilinguals) participated in the study. Children were given 1 minute to name all the elements they knew for a given category (i.e., animals and food). Items produced in the bilingual children’s dominant language were compared to those produced by monolingual children in their single language. Participants were closely matched on key variables that influence verbal fluency performance (i.e., age, gender, vocabulary, socio-economic status, nonverbal-IQ and ASD symptomatology). A time-bin analysis, where the one-minute task was broken up into four time bins of 15 seconds, was conducted to compare the performance of the bilingual children with ASD to that of their monolingual peers with ASD.

Results: A two-way mixed ANOVA showed a main effect for language group (p = .02) with bilingual children with ASD producing more words on average in the animal category. There was also a main effect for time (p < .001) for both categories, with both groups producing more words during the first seconds of the task. The language group by time interaction was not significant for either category.

Conclusions: Findings from this study are in line with prior evidence suggesting that bilingualism is not detrimental for the language or cognitive skills of children with ASD (Drysdale et al., 2015). Contrary to findings from the neurotypical literature, bilingual children with ASD outperformed their monolingual peers, which suggest that bilingualism might yield some positive outcomes for children on the autism spectrum. This study offers novel evidence concerning the verbal fluency abilities of bilingual children with ASD growing up in bilingual contexts.

Authors

• Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero, Dalhousie University
  Presenting Author

• Megan Mongeau, Dalhousie University

• Anna Gores, Dalhousie University