Abstract
The current study evaluated the separate and combined effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on informativeness and definiteness marking of referential expressions. Hebrew-speaking monolingual children (21 with ASD and 28 with typical language development) and Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilingual children (13 with ASD and 30 with typical language development) aged 4-9 years participated. Informativeness, indexed by referential contrasts, was affected by ASD, but not by bilingualism. Definiteness use was non-target-like in children with ASD and in bilingual children, and it was mainly predicted by children's morpho-syntactic abilities in Hebrew. Language-universal and language-specific properties of referential use are discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 215-244 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | Journal of Child Language |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 1 Dec 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Funding
We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their most constructive comments, which helped us improve the manuscript. We would also like to thank the members of the Language Abilities in Children with Autism ‘LACA’ network ( http://laca.humanities.uva.nl/wp/ ) for their ideas and discussions which inspired us to conduct this study. The authors are wholeheartedly grateful to the families and children who took part in the study, and to Marissa Hartston and Revital Berlowitz who helped with data collection. We also would like to thank Lexi Tuch for the proofreading of the earlier version of the manuscript. This research was partially supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1068/16) awarded to Rama Novogrodsky. 1
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Israel Science Foundation | 1068/16 |
Keywords
- Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
- Hebrew
- definiteness
- informativeness
- referential expressions