Development of Vocabulary and Grammar in Bilingual Children with Developmental Disorder

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Many educators and clinicians believe that bilingualism has a negative influence on language development of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). However, there have been few studies conducted to examine if and how bilingualism affects the language development of children with ASD. In this preliminary study, we focused on Japanese-English bilingual children: typically developing children (TD) and children with ASD. To explore vocabulary and grammatical abilities of high functioning Japanese-English bilingual children with ASD (BLASD) in both languages and to compare results with those of typically developing Japanese-English bilingual children (BLTD). BLASD demonstrated higher abilities in Japanese receptive vocabulary than BLTD, while BLTD showed higher abilities in English receptive and expressive vocabulary than BLASD. These results indicate the possibility that vocabulary development is influenced more strongly by the language spoken in the community in which children grow up. No difference was found among groups for English receptive grammar. By contrast, for Japanese receptive grammar, BLASD demonstrated a developmental pattern which was different from the pattern demonstrated by BLTD.