Unexpected bilingualism is surprisingly common among young autistic children

A recent study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry provides evidence that many autistic children can learn to speak a second language without any social exposure to it. These findings suggest that autistic children often acquire language skills through non-interactive sources like videos or tablets. This opens up new ways to think about early language development in nonverbal children.

Autism is a developmental condition that affects how individuals communicate, behave, and interact with the world. It often involves differences in social behavior, repetitive actions, and highly focused interests. Many autistic children experience early delays in speaking, often going through a plateau period between the ages of two and six where their spoken communication develops very slowly.

In typical development, children learn language primarily through social interactions with parents and peers. Because autistic children tend to face challenges with social communication, scientists wanted to understand how they might learn language differently. “I assess more than 100 prototypical autistic children two to five years of age per year,” said study author Laurent Mottron, a medical doctor and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at the University of Montreal.

“The prevalence of intense or exclusive interest for letters and numbers, and learning it in a language that parents do not speak, was obvious,” Mottron continued. He noted that the findings were not shocking. “We strongly expected it based on our clinical experience,” he explained.

To explore this, Mottron and his colleagues decided to look specifically at a concept known as unexpected bilingualism. This occurs when a child uses a language that no one in their daily life actually speaks. The researchers wanted to see if autistic children were more likely to pick up unexpected languages than children without autism.

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The researchers recruited the caregivers of 296 children living in a specific geographic area in Canada. The children in the study were all between the ages of two and six. The sample included 119 autistic children, 102 non-autistic children with other clinical diagnoses like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 75 typically developing children.

The researchers conducted detailed telephone interviews with the caregivers to gather data about the children. They asked specific questions about the children’s daily language use, their interests, and the exact types of languages spoken at home or in daycare. Caregivers also provided information about the children’s use of non-interactive media, such as televisions, computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

The research team focused heavily on the children’s ability to name letters and numbers. Learning these symbols is a common early interest for autistic children, making it a systematic way to measure language skills even in children who barely speak. The researchers defined unexpected bilingualism as situations where a child used an unknown language to name letters or numbers that was completely absent from their social environment.

The data revealed that 53 percent of the autistic children in the sample had very limited verbal abilities. Despite this limitation, 38.7 percent of the autistic children demonstrated unexpected bilingualism. This rate was significantly higher than the 14.7 percent seen in the non-autistic clinical group and the 12 percent in the typically developing group.

Statistical analysis showed that the autistic children were 4.38 times more likely to exhibit unexpected bilingualism than the typically developing children. English was the most common unexpected language used among the children in this predominantly French-speaking Canadian sample. Even when accounting for brief social exposure to English, autistic children were still 8.28 times more likely to use it than typically developing children.

Caregivers reported that the unexpected languages were acquired exclusively through non-interactive media. Children learned these new languages from online videos, television shows, and tablet games. In some instances, autistic children actively sought out this media, such as requesting to watch cartoons only in a foreign language.

These findings challenge the traditional view that screen time is purely detrimental to early development. Mottron suggests “that autistic children with speech onset delay have a benefit in accessing YouTube in a regulated way.” He added that this approach “orients toward ‘lateral tutorship in autism intervention,’ which is the opposite of ABA [Applied Behavior Analysis].” Applied Behavior Analysis is a common therapy that uses interactive rewards to shape behavior, whereas lateral tutorship relies on a child’s self-directed learning.

But Mottron wants to preempt a few potential misinterpretations. He cautioned against thinking “that you can leave the tablet eight hours a day to an autistic child, that all autistic children are ‘genius learners,’ or that it favors ‘facilitated communication’ theory.” Facilitated communication is a discredited practice where a guide physically supports a nonverbal person’s hand to help them type messages.

There are also important limitations to keep in mind regarding the study’s timeline. “We did not follow these children after six years of age, so we do not know to what extent this will support their acquisition of oral or written language,” Mottron noted. “This will be done in the future.”

The research also relied on caregivers to estimate social exposure, which depends on human memory and might lack precision. Future research will examine how specific traits of autism influence this independent learning process.

Mottron stated that the next steps are to “determine how strongly this is associated with prototypical autism, and to what extent it supports future language learning.” Ultimately, he hopes to explore “how we can build a recommendation system that subtly orients autistic children with literacy, for those who do not find it on their own.”

The study, “Early manifestations of unexpected bilingualism in minimally verbal autism,” was authored by David Gagnon, Alexia Ostrolenk, and Laurent Mottron.