UBC News – Staff Writer
“Children with autism spectrum disorders often have troubles communicating and developing language skills. Parents are often told to focus on speaking and teaching just one language to their child…Stefka Marinova-Todd, associate professor at UBC’s School of Audiology and Speech Sciences…debunks the perception that bilingualism hampers language development in children with autism…“We found that bilingual children with ASD acquire vocabularies that are just as rich as monolingual children with ASD, indicating that bilingualism does not have a negative effect on the language development of children with autism…It is important for future speech-language therapists to know that bilingualism is not detrimental to the language development of children with language delay and/or disorders. In fact, imposed monolingualism is much more likely to have negative effects on these children’s language development and socialization…Today, there are far more bilingual and multilingual individuals around the world than monolingual, and these numbers are constantly growing. This means that the number of bilingual patients and clients in clinical settings is constantly growing as well. We are now working on another project that will push the boundaries a bit further and examine whether bilingual children with autism experience cognitive advantages. This phenomenon, a bilingual brain boost so to speak – has been reported in children who don’t have developmental disabilities. The results are still to come but we might find that children with autism raised bilingually experience added benefits as well.””(more)