Franco Maïte, Costa Andreia P
Institute for Health and Behaviour, Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, Maison des Sciences Humaines, University of Luxembourg, 11 Porte des Sciences, Esch-sur-Alzette, L-4366, Luxembourg.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 May 29. doi: 10.1007/s10803-024-06347-w.
Parents of autistic children are often advised to use only one language to simplify their child's language acquisition. Often this recommendation orients towards the geographically predominant language, which may cause difficulties especially for minority-language families. On the other hand, scientific evidence suggests that multilingualism does not hinder language acquisition and that communicating in exclusively foreign languages may even impede social interaction. Therefore, we investigated how parent language use is linked to the social skills of 68 autistic children and to their parents' ability to feel comfortable, authentic, and free to express themselves.
Data was collected online, using parent-report questionnaires from parents of 25 different nationalities in the European context, assessing children's language, autistic traits (AQ-C), social skills (SRS-2), and parent-child communication.
Language use was not found to significantly relate to social skills in children. However, parents using their mother tongue, either only their mother tongue or in combination with other languages, reported feeling significantly more comfortable and more authentic than parents using exclusively foreign languages, either one or many. There were no significant differences between monolingual and multilingual families regarding parents' feelings in regard to their language use.
Our findings may encourage specialists to consider multilingualism more often and consult with parents whether monolingualism is worth risking the negative outcomes we have found. Especially, since advising parents to raise their child multilingually may facilitate access to therapeutic treatment, childcare, and social interaction in multilingual societies and families and subsequently improve support and orientation for stakeholders.
自闭症儿童的家长常被建议只使用一种语言，以简化孩子的语言习得过程。通常，这一建议倾向于使用当地占主导地位的语言，这可能会给使用少数族裔语言的家庭带来困难。另一方面，科学证据表明，多语言能力不会阻碍语言习得，而仅用外语交流甚至可能妨碍社会互动。因此，我们研究了68名自闭症儿童的家长的语言使用情况与孩子社交技能之间的联系，以及与家长在表达自我时感到舒适、真实和自在的能力之间的联系。
在欧洲范围内，通过在线收集来自25个不同国籍家长的家长报告问卷数据，评估孩子的语言、自闭症特征（自闭症谱系商数儿童版）、社交技能（社会反应量表第二版）以及亲子沟通情况。
未发现语言使用与儿童社交技能之间存在显著关联。然而，使用母语的家长，无论是仅使用母语还是母语与其他语言结合使用，比仅使用一种或多种外语的家长报告称感觉更加舒适和真实。单语家庭和多语家庭在家长对其语言使用感受方面没有显著差异。
我们的研究结果可能会促使专家更频繁地考虑多语言能力，并与家长商讨单语是否值得冒我们所发现的负面后果的风险。特别是，由于建议家长以多语言方式抚养孩子可能会促进多语言社会和家庭中获得治疗、儿童保育和社会互动，进而改善对相关利益者的支持和指导。
