Peristeri Eleni, Vogelzang Margreet, Tsimpli Ianthi Maria
Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Larissa, Faculty of Medicine, University of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece.
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Neurobiol Lang (Camb). 2021 Dec 23;2(4):558-585. doi: 10.1162/nol_a_00055. eCollection 2021.
The deficit in cognitive flexibility (i.e., the ability to adapt cognitive behavior to changing contexts) is one of the most prominent characteristics of autistic individuals. Inflexibility may manifest in restricted interests and increased susceptibility to the effects of misinformation either through inefficient inhibition of non-target information or deficient recall of correct information. Bilingualism has been shown to enhance executive functions in both typically developing children and autistic children; yet, the effect of bilingualism on cognitive flexibility in autism remains underexplored. In this study, we used verbal dual-tasks to compare cognitive flexibility across 50 monolingual autistic and 50 bilingual autistic children, and 50 monolingual and 50 bilingual typically developing children. The children were also administered language ability tests and a nonverbal global-local cognitive flexibility task, in order to investigate whether performance in the dual-tasks would be modulated by the children's language and executive function skills. The bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual autistic peers in the dual-tasks. The strength of the bilingualism effect, however, was modulated by the type of language processing that interfered with the target information in each dual-task, which suggests that the bilingual autistic children calibrated their processing resources and efficiently adapted them to the changing demands of the dual-task only to the extent that the task did not exceed their language abilities. Bilingual autistic children relied on their executive functions rather than on their language abilities while performing in the dual-tasks. The overall results show that bilingualism compensates for the reduced cognitive flexibility in autism.
认知灵活性缺陷（即认知行为适应不断变化的情境的能力）是自闭症个体最显著的特征之一。灵活性不足可能表现为兴趣受限，以及由于对非目标信息的抑制效率低下或正确信息的回忆不足，而更容易受到错误信息的影响。双语已被证明能增强正常发育儿童和自闭症儿童的执行功能；然而，双语对自闭症认知灵活性的影响仍未得到充分研究。在本研究中，我们使用言语双重任务来比较50名单语自闭症儿童、50名双语自闭症儿童、50名单语正常发育儿童和50名双语正常发育儿童的认知灵活性。还对这些儿童进行了语言能力测试和一项非言语的全局-局部认知灵活性任务，以调查双重任务中的表现是否会受到儿童语言和执行功能技能的调节。双语自闭症儿童在双重任务中的表现优于他们的单语自闭症同龄人。然而，双语效应的强度受到每个双重任务中干扰目标信息的语言处理类型的调节，这表明双语自闭症儿童仅在任务不超过其语言能力的程度上校准他们的处理资源，并有效地使其适应双重任务不断变化的需求。双语自闭症儿童在执行双重任务时依赖于他们的执行功能而不是语言能力。总体结果表明，双语弥补了自闭症中认知灵活性的降低。
