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Article published In:
Language Impairment in Bilingual Children: State of the art 2017
Edited by Theodoros Marinis, Sharon Armon-Lotem and George Pontikas
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7:3/4] 2017
► pp. 460–475

Verbal fluency in bilingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

| McGill University
| McGill University

We examine the impact of bilingualism on verbal fluency in four groups of school-age (5 to 10 years-old) children: 13 Typically-developing (TYP) monolingual children, 13 TYP bilingual children, 13 monolingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and 13 bilingual children with ASD. Participants were matched on chronological age and nonverbal IQ. Verbal fluency was examined via the word association subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-4; Semel et al., 2003). The bilingual ASD group performed unexpectedly well on the verbal fluency task, not differing from the typically-developing groups, but outperforming the monolingual ASD group with respect to number of correct words produced. These findings are in line with previous research on bilingual children with ASD (e.g., Hambly & Fombonne, 2012) and taken together suggest that bilingualism does not have a negative impact on the lexical-semantic skills of children with ASD.

Keywords: Bilingualism, Autism Spectrum Disorders, lexical-semantic abilities, executive functions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research hypothesis
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 16 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15023.gon
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