Past Event

Children with autism often experience language delays. In this context, it is a common belief that bilingualism may be too challenging for them and may harm their language development. (1) We examined whether proficient bilingualism is possible in school-age children with autism growing up in Montreal, by assessing their language skills as well as by examining the relationship between their amount of language exposure and skills in that language. Our findings demonstrate that proficient bilingualism is possible for some children with autism. (2) Children with autism demonstrate significant executive function (EF) difficulties. Enhanced EF performance has sometimes been reported in typically-developing bilingual children relative to monolinguals. We hypothesized that proficient bilingualism may alleviate EF impairments in autism, and tested this using verbal and non-verbal tasks. In both cases, proficient bilinguals with autism outperformed well-matched monolinguals with autism. These findings build on previous research demonstrating that bilingualism is not detrimental for language development in autism. Moreover, they provide novel evidence indicating that bilingualism may even hold benefits with respect to mitigating some executive function impairments in this population.