2018 Sat Poster 6464

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Theory of Mind and pronoun use in bilingual and monolingual children with Autism
N. Meir, R. Bazes, M. Hartston, R. Novogrodsky

Little is known about the influence of bilingualism on Theory of Mind (ToM) and linguistic skills of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Previous studies on bilingual children with ASD have mainly focused on lexical development (Drysdale, van der Meer, & Kagohara, 2015). Monolingual children with ASD show deficit in ToM skills and linguistic abilities that involve perspective-taking and pragmatic judgments (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). For example, monolingual children with ASD have notorious problems with pronoun use (Hale & Tager- Flusberg, 2005; Novogrodsky, 2013). The current study assesses effects of bilingualism and ASD on ToM skills and pronoun use.

Sixty-two bilingual and monolingual children (ages 5;00-8;08) with ASD (n=24) and with typical language development (TLD) (n=38) were compared on their ToM skills and pronoun use. Children with ASD received their diagnoses by a multidisciplinary team of specialists prior to the study, and their ASD status was verified using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; Lord et al., 1999) as part of the assessment battery. All children scored within the norm on non-verbal IQ as measured by Raven’s Colored Matrices (Raven, 1998).

The performance on the Smarties unexpected content task (Perner et al. 1987) and 1st and 2nd order false-belief tasks (adapted from Buac & Kaushanskaya, 2017) were combined into a composite ToM score. The pronoun elicitation task elicited third person pronouns in subject and object positions. These tasks were administered in Hebrew.

ToM and Pronoun use scores were analyzed using two-way ANOVAs with Clinical Group (ASD, TLD) and Language Status (Monolingual, Bilingual) as independent variables (Table 1). For the ToM score, there was a negative effect of Clinical Group, no effect of Language Status, yet a significant Clinical Group* Language Status interaction. The interaction indicated that no differences were observed between bilingual and monolingual children with ASD, yet in the TLD group monolinguals outperformed bilinguals. Further analysis showed that differences between children with TLD disappeared once age and vocabulary scores were controlled for. As for pronoun use, there was an effect of Clinical Group, no effect of Language Status and no interaction between the two variables. Children with ASD showed lower production of target pronouns and a distinctive error profile. They omitted pronouns and produced more full noun phrases instead of pronouns as compared with children with TLD. In addition, we evaluated the link between ToM, pronoun use and age. In the ASD group, pronoun use was associated with ToM skills, this association was not found in the TLD group. As for age, there was no developmental pattern for ToM and pronoun use in children with ASD, while in children with TLD, there was an association between age and ToM skills.

To conclude, the findings confirm a core ToM deficit in children with ASD regardless of their language status. Furthermore, it supports that the mechanism of pronoun use in children with ASD is associated with their ToM skills. Importantly, the findings show that bilingualism is NOT an aggravating factor for ToM and pronoun use skills of children with ASD.

References

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46.

Buac, M., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2017). Theory of mind in bilingual versus monolingual children: What predicts performance? Talk presented at International Ssmposium on Bilingualism (ISB2017), University of Limierick, Ireland.

Hale, C. M., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2005). Social communication in children with autism. Autism, 9(2), 157–178.

Lord, C., Rutter, M., DiLavore, P.S. & Risi, S. (1999). Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule: Manual. Los Angeles, LA: Western Psychological Services.

Novogrodsky, R. (2013). Subject pronoun use by children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 27(2), 85–93.

Perner, J., Leekam, S., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. The British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125–137.

Raven, J. C. (1998). The Coloured Progressive Matrices. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press.