Chapter 8. Bilingualism matters

Abstract

This study investigated bilingualism effects on language, executive functions and Theory of Mind (ToM) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The performance of these clinical groups was compared to that of children with typical development (TD). All groups were matched on socio-economic status, IQ and chronological age (oscillating around 11 years), and were composed of a total of one hundred and twenty-two participants. Overall, children with ASD and DLD showed more difficulty than their TD peers on language tasks, and monolingual children with ASD struggled more than other groups on both EF and ToM tasks. Bilingualism boosts in executive functions and ToM emerged in bilingual children with ASD compared to their monolingual peers with ASD, however these bilingual advantages were not observed in children with DLD. More specifically, bilinguals with ASD performed better than their monolingual peers at inhibiting distracting non-verbal stimuli and at attributing false beliefs. Bilingual autistic children’s performance in the ToM task related to IQ, sentence comprehension and (marginally) to socio-economic status. Taken together, these findings highlight the selective cognitive benefits of bilingualism, which may vary depending on the children’s condition, on their individual cognitive and linguistic abilities, as well as on their socio-economic backgrounds. This work also shows that bilingualism has no negative effects on children’s development, including those with ASD or DLD.