The impact of autism on the heritage language of Spanish-English bilingual children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RESEARCH PROBLEM: Research on bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is limited. Existing studies have focused on childrenâs second language (L2) development and little attention has been given to heritage language (HL) development. This thesis responds to the question, âdoes an autism diagnosis jeopardize an HL?â The goal of this thesis is to determine patterns of dual-language acquisition for three school-aged children with ASD living in a minority language (HL; Spanish) home within majority language (L2; English) communities (Alberta, Canada). METHODS: Three Spanish-English bilingual children with high-functioning ASD, between the ages of 6 to 9 (with 60 to 77 months of English exposure), from homes with high socio-economic status (SES), were examined for a variety of factors including parent attitudes toward bilingualism, language input and output, overall language dominance, and HL maintenance patterns across lexical, morphosyntax, and narrative macrostructure domains. RESULTS: Family attitudes were generally positive toward bilingualism and parents aimed to maintain the HL. Family-members, overall, provided more HL than L2 input to the children, while children exhibited more HL output directed toward parents than to siblings. Environmental factors corresponded to HL preservation across linguistic domains even though children demonstrated overall language dominance in the L2. HL abilities, however, differed across linguistic domains. Children did not exhibit significant deficits in lexical skills and narrative macrostructure abilities in the HL; in contrast, they did demonstrate deficits in HL morphosyntax. Additionally, when comparing childrenâs L2 performance to typically developing monolinguals, deficits in the morphosyntax domain were also revealed. CONCLUSION: In the 3 children examined, an ASD diagnosis did not jeopardize the HL. However, despite parentsâ best efforts to maintain the HL, childrenâs HL skills remain weaker than their L2 proficiency, especially in the morphosyntax domain. Thus, children with ASD may still be at risk of HL attrition. Results indicated that higher HL skills correlated with more opportunities to listen and practice the HL in the home and community. Findings also demonstrated that morphosyntax abilities in bilingual children with ASD require future attention by researchers and clinicians to help inform parents on how best to support dual-language development in children with ASD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".