Perceptions of Bilingualism in Bilingual Autistic Children

Both bilingualism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are growing more prevalent at a steady rate, highlighting the urgent need to identify bilingualism’s contribution to the language skills of autistic children. Parents play a central role in fostering bilingualism, as parental perceptions on bilingualism inform their decision-making processes. There is a common belief among clinicians and educators that bilingualism may cause delays in the language development of autistic children, usually resulting in advising caregivers to raise their children monolingually. However, there is no clear evidence to support that bilingualism causes language delays in autistic children. Thus, professional recommendations are mainly based on intuition and inadequate. Previous studies have found that even with evidence that their children could learn more than one language, parents of autistic children still believe that raising a child as a bilingual individual may be detrimental to their development. At present, there is a significant gap in understanding how different cultures and beliefs systems might influence the language development of autistic children from bilingual families. The purpose of this study is to culturally and linguistically adapt the Perceptions of Bilingualism scales and to compare perceptions of the value of bilingualism among parents of school-aged autistic and neurotypical children to identify whether the interplay of parental perceptions, diagnoses (ASD versus neurotypical), and other sociodemographic characteristics (the child’s age and gender, parental education level, language exposure history, and parental proficiency in both languages) act as facilitators or barriers to the language development of bilingual autistic children. It is expected that favorable parental perceptions of bilingualism will be associated with higher language skills development among all groups, with a stronger effect on autistic children.