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Article published In: Language Impairment in Bilingual Children: State of the art 2017
Edited by Theodoros Marinis, Sharon Armon-Lotem and George Pontikas
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:3/4] 2017
► pp. 460–475

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Verbal fluency in bilingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

 | McGill University
 | McGill University
Published online: 16 September 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15023.gon
Abstract
We examine the impact of bilingualism on verbal fluency in four groups of school-age (5 to 10 years-old) children: 13 Typically-developing (TYP) monolingual children, 13 TYP bilingual children, 13 monolingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and 13 bilingual children with ASD. Participants were matched on chronological age and nonverbal IQ. Verbal fluency was examined via the word association subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-4; Semel, E., Wiig, E. H., & Secord, W. A. (2003). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (4th ed.). San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The bilingual ASD group performed unexpectedly well on the verbal fluency task, not differing from the typically-developing groups, but outperforming the monolingual ASD group with respect to number of correct words produced. These findings are in line with previous research on bilingual children with ASD (e.g., Hambly, C., & Fombonne, E. (2012). The impact of bilingual environments on language development in children with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 421, 1342–1352. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and taken together suggest that bilingualism does not have a negative impact on the lexical-semantic skills of children with ASD.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research hypothesis
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (43)
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