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Bilingualism

Does bilingualism or autism affect children's pronoun use?

Meir N, Novogrodsky R · Frontiers in psychology · 2019

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

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.

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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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Key findings

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.

Methodology

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.

Limitations

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.

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