Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: How does growing up in a bilingual environment affect the linguistic, cognitive and social development of children and, importantly, do these developmental effects differ for children with autism spectrum disorders? To answer these questions, we will collect detailed longitudinal cognitive and family data from bilingually-exposed children with autism and typically developing children. Rather than including a monolingual control group, we will recruit children whose levels of exposure to more than one language vary greatly in both quantity and quality. Exposure-level will then be used to investigate dose-dependent effects of bilingualism on linguistic and cognitive development as well as family experience. This project will provide an evidence base for making clinical recommendations about linguistic exposure for children with autism, and will allow us to test important theoretical claims about how the bilingual environment affects language and cognitive development.