Brief Report: Vocabulary and Grammatical Skills of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders at School Age

We examined the lexical and grammatical skills of monolingual and bilingual school-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Thirteen monolingual and thirteen bilingual children with ASD without intellectual disability, were compared on standardized measures of vocabulary and morphology. Findings revealed that bilingual children performed in the average monolingual range on a standardized receptive vocabulary test and slightly below the average range on a standardized morphological task in their dominant language. Prior work indicates that bilingual exposure is not detrimental for early language development in children with autism. The current findings suggest that at school age, bilinguals with ASD show similar language development patterns as those described in the literature on typically-developing bilinguals.