To Be or Not to Be Bilingual: Autistic Children from Multilingual Families

Typically, parents of high functioning autistic (HFA) children report that, unlike normal children, their children display very little language and sometimes no language at all as they reach three and even four years of age (Sigman& Capps,1997; parents’ interviews 1998). In many cases the lack of language provokes parents to seek professional assessment. After eliminating hearing problems as the cause for language impairment, many parents bring their children to a developmental clinic for a diagnosis. Upon diagnosis of autism parents send their children to speech therapy and with time and effort the children improve their language skills. Parents whose native language is other than English indicated that they were advised upon diagnosis of autism in their child to speak only one language to their child, namely English regardless of the parents' English proficiency. Parents understood that English should be the language of choice to ensure the child's exposure to the same language inside and outside the home. This way, clinicians attempted to ensure that the child was exposed to "simplified" linguistic input in order to facilitate language learning and use. For these professionals simplified input meant exposure to one language only, English. The following two excerpts taken from interviews with mothers of HFA children exhibit the change in language use those families made.