Does bilingualism or autism affect children's pronoun use?
Children with high-functioning autism produced fewer third-person pronouns than typically developing peers, but being bilingual did not reduce pronoun use in either group.
Source
Prerequisites of Third-Person Pronoun Use in Monolingual and Bilingual Children With Autism and Typical Language Development
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Cross-sectional 2x2 comparison of pre-existing groups (Hebrew monolingual vs Russian-Hebrew bilingual; high-functioning autism vs typical language development) on a 12-item picture-based pronoun elicitation task, plus stepwise regressions on morpho-syntax, theory of mind, working memory and inhibition; an adult group gave a baseline
- N
- N=85 · 85 children: 14 monolingual and 13 bilingual with high-functioning autism, 28 monolingual and 30 bilingual with typical language development; plus 18 monolingual adult controls who did the pronoun task only.
- Population
- Hebrew-speaking children, matched on age and non-verbal IQ, with or without a prior autism diagnosis (reconfirmed with ADOS), and bilingual children with Russian as their heritage language, in Israel
- Outcome
- Production of third-person subject and object pronouns (versus omissions or full noun phrases) on a sentence-completion task
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What they did
The researchers tested 85 Hebrew-speaking children in four groups: monolingual or Russian-Hebrew bilingual, each with either high-functioning autism or typical language development, matched on age and non-verbal IQ. Children completed sentences about pictures in a way that invited a subject pronoun (he/she) or an object pronoun (him/her), with 6 items of each type. The children were also tested on morpho-syntax (sentence repetition), theory of mind (three false-belief tasks), working memory (backward digit span) and inhibition (embedded figures), and 18 Hebrew-speaking adults did the pronoun task as a reference.
What they found
Children with autism produced fewer pronouns than typically developing children, especially in object position, whereas adults showed the opposite pattern with more object than subject pronouns. Bilingualism had no significant main effect and did not interact with autism in overall pronoun use; for omissions specifically, monolingual but not bilingual children with autism omitted more than their typical peers. In the autism groups, subject-pronoun use was predicted by morpho-syntax, working memory and theory of mind, and object-pronoun use by morpho-syntax only; in typically developing children only age predicted pronoun use.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The autism groups were small (13 and 14 children) and very heterogeneous, so the regressions within them are fragile, and stepwise regression tends to overfit. Groups were pre-existing rather than assigned, so the design shows differences, not causes. Russian and Hebrew have similar pronoun systems, so the absence of a bilingual cost may not hold for language pairs whose pronoun rules differ. The elicitation task worked at sentence level with only 12 items, which may underestimate the role of theory of mind in real discourse, and inhibition was measured with a visual rather than a verbal task.
Key terms
- High-functioning autism (HFA)
- Autism spectrum disorder in a person whose non-verbal IQ is within the typical range.
- Pro-drop
- Whether a language allows a pronoun to be left out (a null subject or object) when the referent can be recovered from context or verb agreement.
- Heritage language
- A language spoken at home by a minority community, here Russian, as opposed to the societal language used in school, here Hebrew.
- Theory of mind
- The ability to represent other people's beliefs and knowledge, often tested with false-belief tasks.
- Morpho-syntax
- Knowledge of word forms and sentence structure, such as gender, number and case marking; here indexed by sentence repetition.
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Quiz yourself
What was the main finding about bilingualism and pronoun use?
Common questions
Does this show that raising an autistic child bilingually is harmful?
No. Bilingual children with autism used pronouns as well as monolingual children with autism, and on omissions they even resembled typically developing bilinguals. The authors conclude bilingualism is not harmful, at least for Russian-Hebrew speakers.
Why is using pronouns considered a demanding skill?
Choosing he versus him or deciding whether a pronoun can be dropped requires grammatical knowledge, keeping the referent active in working memory, and judging what the listener already knows, which draws on theory of mind.
Why did adults use more object than subject pronouns?
In Hebrew, third-person subject pronouns can sometimes be dropped when context makes them clear, while object pronouns are almost always produced, so adults naturally omitted more subjects.
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