Recent research published in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry This provides evidence that many children with autism can learn a second language without social exposure. These findings suggest that children with autism often acquire language skills through non-interactive sources such as videos and tablets. This opens up new ways to think about early language development in children with nonverbal abilities.
Autism is a developmental condition that affects how individuals communicate, behave, and interact with the world. It often involves differences in social behavior, repetitive behaviors, and highly focused interests. Many children with autism experience language delays early on, often going through a plateau between the ages of 2 and 6, when the development of vocal communication is very slow.
During typical development, children learn language primarily through social interactions with parents and peers. Because children with autism tend to face difficulties in social communication, scientists wanted to understand how they learn language differently. “I evaluated more than 100 typically autistic children between the ages of two and five,” says study author Laurent Mottron, a physician and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Addictions at the University of Montreal.
“It was clear that there was a widespread strong or exclusive interest in letters and numbers, and that children were learning them in a language that their parents did not speak,” Mottron continued. He noted that the findings were not shocking. “We had high expectations for that based on clinical experience,” he explained.
To investigate this, Mottron and his colleagues decided to focus specifically on a concept known as unexpected bilingualism. This occurs when a child uses a language in their daily life that no one actually speaks to them. Researchers wanted to see if children with autism were more likely to acquire unexpected language than children without autism.
Researchers recruited 296 caregivers of children living in specific geographic regions of Canada. All children who participated in the study were between 2 and 6 years old. The sample included 119 children with autism, 102 non-autistic children with a clinical diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and 75 neurotypical children.
Researchers conducted in-depth telephone interviews with caregivers to collect data about the children. They asked specific questions about the children’s everyday language use, their interests, and the exact types of languages spoken at home and in daycare. Parents also provided information about their children’s use of non-interactive media such as television, computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
The research team focused on children’s ability to name letters and numbers. Learning these symbols is a common early interest for children with autism and has become a systematic way to measure language skills, even in children who barely speak. The researchers defined unexpected bilingualism as a situation in which a child uses an unknown language to name letters and numbers that are completely absent from their social environment.
The data revealed that 53 percent of the autistic children in the sample had very limited language skills. Despite this limitation, 38.7 percent of children with autism demonstrated unexpected bilingualism. This rate was significantly higher than the 14.7 percent seen in the non-autistic clinical group and the 12 percent found in the neurotypical group.
Statistical analysis showed that children with autism were 4.38 times more likely to exhibit unexpected bilingualism than neurotypical children. The unexpected language most commonly used among children in this predominantly French-speaking Canadian sample was English. Even after accounting for short-term social exposure to English, children with autism were still 8.28 times more likely to use English than typically developing children.
Caregivers reported that unexpected language was acquired exclusively through non-interactive media. Children learned these new languages from online videos, TV shows, and tablet games. In some cases, autistic children actively sought out this media, such as requesting to watch anime only in a foreign language.
These findings challenge the conventional view that screen time is purely detrimental to early development. Mottron suggests that “children with autism who have speech delays could benefit from accessing YouTube in a regulated way.” He added that this approach is “oriented toward ‘lateral guidance in autism intervention,’ as opposed to ABA (applied behavior analysis).” Applied behavior analysis is a common therapy that uses interactive rewards to shape behavior, while lateral guidance relies on the child’s self-directed learning.
But Mottron wants to avoid some potential misunderstandings. He warned against “ideas that it’s okay to leave autistic children with a tablet for eight hours a day, that all autistic children are ‘gifted learners’, that support the ‘facilitated communication’ theory.” Facilitated communication is an untrusted act in which a guide physically supports a nonverbal person’s hand to help type a message.
There are also important limitations to keep in mind regarding the study schedule. “We didn’t follow these children beyond the age of six, so we don’t know how much this supports their acquisition of oral or written language,” Mottron said. “This will be done in the future.”
The study also relied on caregivers to estimate social exposure, which relies on human memory and can lack precision. Future research will investigate how specific characteristics of autism affect this independent learning process.
Mottron said the next step is to “determine how strongly this is associated with typical autism and to what extent it supports future language learning.” Ultimately, she would like to explore “how we can create a recommendation system that subtly builds literacy skills for children with autism, for those who cannot identify them on their own.”
The study, “Early Symptoms of Unexpected Bilingualism in Minimal Language Autism,” was authored by David Gagnon, Alexia Ostrolenk, and Laurent Mottron.
