The Linguist

The Linguist 60,2 April/May 2021

The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology

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20 The Linguist Vol/60 No/2 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES As such, different types of bilingualism, for example constantly switching between languages compared to using each language in distinct contexts, can lead to different effects on different cognitive skills. To date, this innovative and more naturalistic approach to bilingualism has mostly been used to understand the effects of bilingualism in neurotypical development. First, I had to understand who autistic bilinguals are, because the only autistic people previously represented in academic research and the media were polyglot savants or children from bilingual families. This was unlikely to be representative of the autistic bilingual population. Indeed, my research was the first account of the great diversity of the autistic bilingual population, as rich and varied as the wider bilingual population. 2 The results highlighted numerous profiles and experiences not represented or accounted for in clinical and education practices or in academic literature. They called for a much-needed change in these fields. A different perspective My research focused on the skill of 'perspective-taking', used to take someone else's point of view and understand what that person thinks or feels. Autistic people can experience difficulties with perspective- taking, and certain therapies explicitly teach how to do this. I discovered that perspective-taking was indeed shaped by bilingualism, and specifically by the age of acquisition of the second language. The younger the participants were when they learned the second language, the better they performed at the perspective- taking task, regardless of other differences, such as age, non-verbal intelligence and executive skills. This stimulating effect of bilingualism in childhood seems to be long-lasting and is still evident in adulthood. Importantly, my results indicate that this relationship between early bilingualism and perspective-taking skills is similar in autistic and non-autistic people. This is a crucial finding: when it comes to perspective-taking abilities, bilingualism appears to be as beneficial for autistic people as it is for neurotypical people. This suggests that early bilingualism could help autistic children develop perspective-taking implicitly, simply by being in a bilingual setting. Where does this leave us? Of course, these results do not mean that all autistic children should be raised bilingually. Instead, they support previous evidence that bilingualism is not a burden for the development of autistic people. Accordingly, bilingual parents should not worry about using their mother tongue with their autistic child, and autistic people wishing to learn additional languages should be encouraged and supported. The best language strategy should simply be the one that works best for each autistic person individually. Indeed, bilingualism is not only beneficial for cognitive abilities, it also shapes people's lives. When I asked people how being autistic and bilingual had shaped them they reported that learning languages had brought them much more than the languages themselves: it had increased their leisure, education and employment opportunities; boosted their self-confidence; helped them to understand themselves and others better; and brought them closer to the global autistic community. Notes 1 I will use 'bilingualism' to refer to the knowledge of two or more languages, regardless of the level of fluency, and 'monolingualism' for the knowledge of only one language. 2 Digard, BG, Sorace, A, Stanfield, A and Fletcher-Watson, S (2020) 'Bilingualism in Autism: Language learning profiles and social experiences'. In Autism, 24(8), 2166-2177; https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320937845 CHANGING MINDS Some autistic people have been denied a bilingal upbringing because of unfounded concerns about the impact on their linguistic development, but this can exclude them from interacting in the family unit © SHUTTERSTOCK

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