Particular polyglots: multilingual students with autism

Abstract

Many American children with autism live in multilingual environments. Yet an almost diametric contrast exists between the advice of practitioners and the recommendations found in scholarly literature. Whereas practitioners almost unanimously counsel that children on the autism spectrum be exposed to English alone, an increasing number of scholars have argued the potential benefits for these children of learning their parents’ native language as well. This paper argues that, in fact, language recommendations for children on the spectrum should fall somewhere between these two poles and be tailored to individual children and their families.

Keywords:

• autism
• culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students
• multilingual
• immigrant

Notes

1. Rising autism diagnoses have been linked to environmental and genetic factors, but also to changes in diagnostic criteria (for example, Grinker 2007).

2. The working group for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) of the American Psychiatric Association, forthcoming in 2013, proposes that Asperger syndrome be subsumed into the autism diagnosis (American Psychiatric Association 2010).

3. Many individuals with high-functioning autism and Asperger syndrome can perform certain pragmatic skills competently – for example, noticing the violation of social rules, displaying politeness, or participating in conversational sequences (Ochs and Solomon 2004).

4. Although these hypotheses were developed in the context of typically developing children, they provide an interesting framework for thinking about children on the autism spectrum, who may be particularly likely to have low first-language proficiency.

5. All of the studies reviewed in this section include individuals with autism. As mentioned previously, the autism spectrum includes individuals with a wide range of abilities. In reviewing these studies, I describe the degree to which participants are affected by autism. This task is complicated by inconsistently used terms. I indicate also instances in which the type or degree of autism is omitted entirely.