Different paths to multilingualism in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): Naturalistic and non-interactive

Iris Hindi, Natalia Meir

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This study is one of the few research efforts investigating unexpected non-interactive foreign language acquisition in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Participants included 46 English-Hebrew-speaking children (ages 4;10 to 12;0): 14 autistic children who acquired English via non-interactive input (ASD-NI); 12 autistic children (ASD-Nat), and 20 non-autistic children with typical language development (TLD-Nat) who acquired English and Hebrew naturalistically. Morpho-syntactic abilities were assessed using Sentence Repetition tasks in both languages. The results showed no group differences for morpho-syntax in English; in Hebrew, the ASD-NI group scored similarly to the ASD-Nat group but lower than the TLD-Nat group. Individual performance differences between Hebrew and English were observed across all groups. Additionally, correlations between exposure and SRep scores were found in both groups for Hebrew but not English. These findings highlight diverse paths to language acquisition in ASD, with children acquiring foreign languages via both naturalistic and non-interactive input.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Child Language
Early online date20 Jan 2025
DOIs
StateE-pub ahead of print - 20 Jan 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Keywords

  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
  • bilingualism/multilingualism
  • morpho-syntax
  • natural
  • non-interactive
  • spontaneous acquisition of foreign language
  • unexpected

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