Language and Theory of Mind in bilingual children with Autism

Monolingual children with HFA show problems with Theory of Mind (ToM)[1] and linguistic phenomena involving ToM and perspective taking, e.g., pronouns[2]. As for linguistic abilities not involving ToM, e.g., morpho-syntax, previous findings on monolingual children with HFA show a mixed picture: some children with HFA have spare morpho-syntactic abilities, while others show deficits.[3] Little is known about the influence of bilingualism on linguistic abilities and cognitive skills of children with ASD. This lack of knowledge creates barriers for professionals encountering bilingual children with ASD[4,5]. The current study was devised to assess the effect of bilingualism on language and Theory of Mind skills of children with HFA. Eighty-five monolingual Hebrew-speaking and bilingual Russian-Hebrew-speaking children aged 4;6-9:2 participated: 27 with HFA (14 monolingual and 13 bilingual), and 58 with TLD (28 monolingual and 30 bilingual). Pronoun use in subject and object positions was assessed in Hebrew. Unexpected Content, 1st- and 2nd order False-Belief tasks were used to evaluate Theory of Mind skills. In addition, children's syntactic abilities, Inhibition and Verbal Working Memory were assessed. The results indicate that bilingual children with HFA perform on par with their monolingual peers on all the tested measures. Thus, in line with previous studies on children with other disabilities[6-7], the study shows that bilingualism does NOT impede language and cognitive development of children with HFA.