BILINGUALISM AND AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER: CONSIDERATIONS FROM A CASE STUDY

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction, and restricted and stereotyped interests. The extent of the communication difficulties and influencing factors in the disorder is debated. In the current study, a case study methodology was adopted to allow for an in-depth analysis of individual language profiles of two adolescents with ASD (one monolingual and one bilingual), and one monolingual adolescent with DLD. Participants completed a series of tasks assessing Italian grammatical abilities as well as a specific investigation of the use of 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd person pronouns. The findings reveal that multilingualism is not a relevant factor in the language disorder in ASD, as the participants with ASD and DLD behaved differently regardless of their language condition: both participants with ASD demonstrated high accuracy on sentence and nonword repetition tasks, in contrast with the participant with DLD. Moreover, both participants with ASD showed high proficiency in the use of pronouns, contrary to the participant with DLD, except for the production of pronouns when the task required a perspective shift from 2^nd to 1^st person.