Speech and Oral Discourse in a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Case Study of Spontaneous Bilingualism. Part II: Psycholinguistic Assessment

Objectives. Pronounced disharmony in verbal communication development is considered a typical developmen­tal feature in infantile autism, however, its manifestations and mechanisms have not yet been studied enough; extremely little is known about the qualitative features of speech development and the psycholinguistic char­acteristics of the language abilities of such children. A dissociation between the semantic-pragmatic and struc­tural-functional components of language development has been reported; however, this feature has significant individual variability in different forms of autism. The aim of the current paper is to introduce a longitudinal study of the speech development in a child with autism accompanied by the phenomenon of spontaneous bilin­gualism in a monolingual family.

Methods. A case of a Lithuanian monolingual boy with early childhood autism is presented, who at the age of 4 years independently began to learn English, which resulted by the end of preschool age in the unbalanced bilingualism with a preference for L2. Longitudinal follow-up included 3 complex clinical examinations of the intellectual and language abilities (at 4, 6 and 8 years) and a psycholinguistic study of language skills in Lithuanian and English at the age of 7years. A battery of tests for assessing grammar, impressive and expres­sive vocabulary, and skills of personal discourse (story-telling and participating in dialogue-reasoning) was employed.

Results. In both languages, a deficiency in the pragmatic competence of story-telling and participating in dialogue-reasoning was revealed; however, lexical and grammatical errors occurred mainly in the native (Lithuanian) language. The study evidenced a deficit of verb expressive vocabulary, especially in Lithuanian language. Comprehension of complex grammatical constructions was impaired in the Lithuanian language to a greater extent than in English. To sum up, the results evidenced a partial compensation for the structural and functional impairment, but the persistence of a deficit in the pragmatics of speech.

Conclusions. The case study illustrates the special nature of speech development in a child with autism and a unique phenomenon of spontaneous bilingualism in a monolingual family.

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