Do grammatical variations between languages influence early language acquisition in autistic individuals?

Abstract

Could grammatical variations between languages influence early language acquisition? This question has been largely overlooked, likely due to the challenges of studying it in typically developing children. By around four years of age, most typically developing children naturally acquire advanced syntactic abilities. In contrast, autistic children often face significant difficulties with language acquisition, with approximately 40 % of those diagnosed with autism never achieving full syntactic language comprehension. If grammatical differences between languages impact syntactic acquisition, autistic individuals speaking different languages could potentially display distinct syntactic development trajectories. To explore this, a longitudinal study was conducted involving children aged 2-5 years diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who utilized a language therapy app that also gathered parent-reported language assessments. Participants were divided into groups based on their native languages: English (N = 5557), Spanish (N = 1763), Portuguese (N = 830), Italian (N = 417), and Russian (N = 313). A linear mixed-effects model with repeated measures was employed to compare each pair of language groups. The analysis revealed no significant differences in the 3-year trajectories of receptive and expressive language development between the groups. These findings suggest that all studied languages are equally effective in supporting language development.

Keywords

ASD / Autism / Language comprehension / Syntactic language / First language acquisition

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The authors are attesting that the informed consent was obtained from caregivers and they were aware of the study's purpose, risks, and benefits. Caregivers have consented to anonymized data analysis and publication of the results. The study was conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2013). Using the Department of Health and Human Services regulations found at 45 CFR 46.101(b)(4), the Biomedical Research Alliance of New York LLC Institutional Review Board (IRB) determined that this research project is exempt from IRB oversight.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Andrey Vyshedskiy: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Alessandro Tagliavia: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis. Edward Khokhlovich: Writing - review & editing, Software, Methodology.

Author contributions

AV and EK designed the study. AT, AV and EK analyzed the data. AT and AV wrote the paper.

Code availability statement

Code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all participants’ caregivers who found time to complete children’s assessments. The language therapy app used to collect the data presented in this manuscript was made possible by the contributions of Rita Dunn, Alexander Faisman, Jonah Elgart, Lisa Lokshina, and Yulia Dumov.

Appendix A. Supplementary material

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found in the online version at doi:10.1016/j.laheal.2025.100056.

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