Multilingual exposure and lexical–executive abilities underlying verbal fluency: A study of children with and without autism

Abstract

Multilingualism provides many benefits for the cognitive and communicative development of non-autistic children, including the development of lexical-semantic abilities. In contrast, the influence of multilingualism is less clear for autistic children, who often experience challenges in the development of language abilities. We present data from 345 autistic and non-autistic children (3–12 years) from semantic and phonemic verbal fluency (VF) tasks. Children’s monolingualism or multilingualism was operationalised as the continuous measure of language exposure entropy. Our study is the first to monitor both semantic and phonemic VF in multilingual autistic children. Non-autistic children show clear benefits of multilingualism for VF emerging with increasing age. For autistic children, there are neither negative nor positive effects of multilingualism on VF. Follow-up analyses reveal that this is independent of the strength of social-communicative autism symptoms. Taken together, our findings reveal that multilingualism is not detrimental for the development of lexical abilities of autistic children.