May J. Wang
Girton College, UK
Title: The interaction between bilingualism and Autism from social, cognitive and perceptual perspectives
Biography
Biography: May J. Wang
Abstract
The presentation takes a novel psycholinguistic approach looking into autism, focusing on the interaction between bilingualism and autism research. It provides a combination of different dimensions, from social to cognitive and perceptual, to explain this relationship. In light of the complexity and variety of symptoms characterised in individuals with autism, this presentation aims to broadly categorise them into three areas - namely social interaction deficits, cognitive deficits, and perceptual irregularities – in order to pinpoint the specific explanations for the abnormalities. In particular, theoretical underpinnings of Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, 1989), Executive Functions (Poljac et al., 2010) and Central Coherence (Happe, 1996) will be compared and discussed in a heterogenous fashion. Multilingualism and additional language development have also attracted attention on the three areas mentioned above. Cognitively, multilingualism was argued to bring upon advantages on domain-general cognitive functions ranging from working memory to inhibition and task-switching (Bialystok, 2009). Theory of Mind and Central Coherence were also associated to how language switches interact with metacognitive awareness and semantics/pragmatics in linguistics. This presentation therefore argues that the theoretical overlap in autism and bilingualism on the Executive Functions domain could be critical in advancing the understanding of both populations in the cognitive perspective. More importantly, this argument posits that the adverse effect from apparent executive dysfunction along with other neurodevelopmental symptoms could potentially be reversed by the acquisition of new languages. Additional language learning could serve as effective practice strategies to compensate for the developmental deficits on social, cognitive and perceptual aspects. The focus of this presentation therefore critically evaluates research that relates the two psychological concepts, aiming to unleash the potential of a rather new area for autism treatment. Further, in light of the lack of research that links the two areas in the academia, this presentation also targets to encourage researchers to explore this multi-beneficial, multidimensional technique to autism intervention.