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Autism and bilingualism

Toyohashi

Hello,

My wife and I are wrestling with the difficult question of whether it is necessary to expose our 4 year old autistic boy to Japanese only, or continue as we have bilingually. We live in Japan, and are both fully bilingual. We speak English at home, and our children attend a Japanese nursery.

Our son's language development has been very slow, and this has worried my wife to the point that she feels we may need to give up on English for a while.
Orthodox thinking in Japan is that concentrating 100% on Japanese first until it is established is best. However, recent research suggests that autistic children's Japanese does not suffer from being exposed to a second language. 
Is there anyone out there who has tried successfully to raise an autistic child bilingually? If there were any examples it would be very encouraging for us.

  • hi - language can be a problem for some with autism.  I'm no expert in answering your question but perhaps trying to learn 2 languages wd be tougher than 1?  When my son was little there was a child in his class who had difficulties learning language.  His parents spoke a different language from english.  English only was spoken in school.  His teacher believed this added to his difficulties.  However this is all I know so apart from suggesting there may be more research you can look at, this is all I can tell you.  bw

  • I have a theory on language generally... (my aspergers trait)..

    Language is a blue marble of harmonics... meaning everyone speaks with the same language and accent in the one local area, due to brain speech wiring in that environment by exposure. Take it when you have a cold or flu, it affects your brain wiring and you start talking differently. Take two explorers founded two different towns in Canada, one was Scottish and the other English, the local natives picked up the language, one tribe spoke with a scottish english accent, the other an english,, even today they still do and they are only 20 miles apart.

    So in conclusion,, expose to the language wires the brain automatically to that frequency, get your childs ears tested, put on story tapes of the english or japanese language. Education is nothing to do with learning, it is about brain wiring exposure, hence the elite put the elites youth all together,, YAY..  Listening to the brightest, you get the brightest by the blue marble harmonics of cultural peer grouping even without trying to learn, it is by default. So the state education, TV education is a mass brain -wiring low IQ proxy control system. Thank goodness I have Autism and missed it, so I learn by unique brain-wiring, Aka Einstein, Newton and Bohr

    The Chinese and Japanese have the highest IQ in the world. But English is a high language also(most vowels), like German and Hebrew.

    Finally do us a favour, give your child the nickname R. Hope you get that. Wink

    A theory, I hope you enjoyed.  

     

     

     

     

  • I don't know about autistic children specifically, but I read once, in How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker, I think, that there is period very early on where the languages we're exposed to as a baby lays down the brain-circuitry needed to speak that language 'as a native'.

    This means that it is then no harder for a child that is exposed to two, even quite different, languages during that period to learn both languages, than it is for a child that is only exposed to one language during that period to learn that one.

    In fact a child exposed to only one language would find it harder to subsequently learn a second language.

    When we also consider that language delay is a common occurance in the development of a child on the Autistic Spectrum, I think it unlikely that your child being exposed to two languages would have contributed to that delay.

    But that last part is pure speculation.