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.
Highlights
The production of referential expressions is a ubiquitous part of communication, and it requires pragmatic judgments about what is appropriate in a given context (Ariel, 1990, 2001; Davies & Arnold, 2018; Serratrice & Allen, 2015)
Russian–Hebrew bilingualism was expected to advance our understanding on how exposure to two languages, which vary in how they encode definiteness, influences referential choice and definiteness marking in monolingual and bilingual children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
We aimed to contribute to the existing literature regarding the extent to which informativeness of referential expressions is language-universal, while definiteness is language-specific, and to further understand how these properties of referential choice are affected by bilingualism and ASD
Summary
The production of referential expressions is a ubiquitous part of communication, and it requires pragmatic judgments about what is appropriate in a given context (Ariel, 1990, 2001; Davies & Arnold, 2018; Serratrice & Allen, 2015). The choice of linguistic expression is determined by its pragmatic relevance in a specific context. Referential expression use is difficult for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder Little is known about how bilingual children with ASD use referential expressions (but see Meir & Novogrodsky, 2019; Peristeri, Baldimtsi, Andreou & Tsimpli, 2020)
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