Disfluencies as a Window into Pragmatic Skills in Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Autistic and Non-Autistic Children.

Researchers studied how bilingual autistic and non-autistic children pause, repeat words, and correct themselves while speaking in Russian and Hebrew. Surprisingly, autistic children had fewer speech interruptions overall and were more consistent across both languages, while non-autistic children varied more between languages. This is the first study to look at these speech patterns in bilingual autistic children.

This study examined speech disfluencies (pauses, repetitions, self-corrections) in 51 bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking children aged 5-9 years, comparing 21 autistic and 30 non-autistic children matched for age and non-verbal intelligence. Using picture-based storytelling tasks, researchers analyzed eleven types of disfluencies across both languages. Counter to expectations from monolingual research, non-autistic children produced more overall disfluencies than autistic children. Autistic children showed fewer filled and silent pauses in Russian and displayed more consistent disfluency patterns across both languages, while non-autistic children showed language-specific variation.

This represents the first investigation of speech disfluencies in bilingual autistic children.

Findings suggest speech assessment and intervention approaches for bilingual autistic children may need to consider language-universal rather than language-specific patterns. Clinical evaluations should account for different disfluency patterns in bilingual versus monolingual autistic populations.

Small sample size (n=51) limits generalizability. Study limited to one specific language pair (Russian-Hebrew). Cross-sectional design prevents understanding of developmental trajectories. Unclear methodology for participant selection and diagnostic confirmation.

There is little research on the production of speech disfluencies such as silent pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and filled pauses (e.g., eh, em) in monolingual autistic children, and there is no data on this crucial part of speech production in bilingual autistic children. This study aims to address this gap by examining disfluency production in bilingual autistic and non-autistic children across two linguistically distinct languages, HL-Russian (the home language) and SL-Hebrew (the societal language). Fifty-one bilingual Russian-Hebrew-speaking autistic and non-autistic children aged 5-9 (autistic: n = 21; non-autistic: n = 30), matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, participated in picture-based story-generation tasks (LITMUS MAIN, Gagarina et al., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 63:1-36, 2019). Audio recordings of narrative samples were transcribed, coded, and scored for eleven disfluency types using CLAN tools.

The non-autistic group produced higher overall disfluency rate than the autistic group. The autistic group exhibited fewer filled and silent pauses than the non-autistic group in HL-Russian. Furthermore, non-autistic children manifested varied distribution of disfluency types across languages, while autistic children displayed more consistent patterns across languages. In summary, we replicated findings from previous research on monolinguals only partly, as no between-group difference in filled pauses was found in SL-Hebrew.

Additionally, bilingual autistic children exhibited language-universal patterns of disfluency production, whereas their non-autistic peers displayed language-specific patterns.