The Interface Between Bilingualism and Autism: A Study of Pronoun Use in Monolingual and Bilingual Children With and Without Autism

Monolingual children with High Functioning Autism (HFA) show deficit in linguistic abilities involving perspective-taking and pragmatic judgments.[1] Monolingual children with HFA have difficulties with pronoun use.[2] In children with typical language development (TLD), pronoun use is related to syntactic knowledge, discourse-pragmatic knowledge, Theory of Mind skills and Executive Functioning.[3] Little is known about the interface of HFA and bilingualism. The current study explored pronoun production in monolingual and bilingual children with and without HFA and investigated the mechanisms of pronoun use in 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). Third-person pronouns in subject and object positions are elicited in Hebrew. In addition, we measured children's syntactic abilities, Theory of Mind skills, Inhibition and Verbal Working Memory. The findings show that pronoun use is compromised in children with HFA, yet bilingualism is NOT an aggravating factor for children with HFA, i.e. monolingual and bilingual children with HFA show similar results. The core deficit of pronoun use in children with HFA is associated with complex syntax , Verbal Working Memory and Theory of Mind difficulties.