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The Impact of Bilingualism on Conversational Understanding in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Objectives: The purpose of the present research is to fill this gap by examining conversational understanding in three monolingual English-speaking and three bilingual English-French-speaking adolescents with autism.
Methods: To examine conversational understanding, we asked a speech and language pathologist to administer a standardized pragmatic test where our participants were first asked to identify utterances that violated conversational rules and then to provide explanations for their answers. The obtained data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. First, we analyzed the answers provided by our participants quantitatively. We then asked three independent raters to analyze the explanations provided by our participants.
Results: The results of our study show that bilingualism does not have a negative impact on the ability of adolescents with autism to detect conversational faux-pas. More specifically, we found that bilingual participants with autism examined in our study were able to detect violations of conversational rules at the same success rate as their monolingual peers with autism. Moreover, our study showed that our bilingual participants with autism were able to provide better explanations for their answers than their monolingual peers.
Conclusions: We hypothesize that a daily exposure of our bilingual participants to a richer linguistic environment could contribute to the development of more advanced linguistic, cognitive and social skills. The information provided in this study can be used to better support the needs of bilingual families who have children with autism.