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Purpose: Autistic children with limited spoken language ability (LSLA) often do not respond to traditional interventions, reducing their social inclusion. It is essential to identify effective interventions, and sensitive measures to track their intervention response. Methods: Using data from an RCT comparing music-mediated and play-based interventions, we investigated the impact of spoken language ability on outcomes, and measured response to intervention through natural language sample measures. Results: Children with lower verbal IQ, relative to higher verbal IQ, made some greater gains over the course of music-mediated intervention. Natural language samples were helpful in characterizing communication and tracking change. Conclusion: Music-mediated interventions hold promise as effective interventions for autistic children with LSLA. Natural language samples are robust in characterizing this subgroup.

The study investigated how narratives are influenced by both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and bilingualism. We analyzed the short narratives of school-age Quebec French-speaking children: bilinguals with and without ASD, and monolinguals with and without ASD. Children were given sets of three picture cards depicting a scenario, and were asked to sequence the cards and tell a story. We measured: (1) language production (number of utterances, total number of words), (2) macrostructure (appropriate sequencing of events, number of events mentioned, coherence), (3) microstructure (character introductions, maintenance of referential terms, use of grammatical gender, use of connectives), and (4) evaluative devices (both linguistic and non-linguistic), and mental state terms. With respect to language production, bilinguals produced more utterances than monolinguals, despite having marginally lower receptive vocabulary scores in French. With respect to macrostructure, typically-developing children provided more coherent narratives. No significant differences were found on microstructure or evaluative devices, but evaluative devices were infrequent for all groups. There were no decrements in the narratives of bilingual children relative to monolingual children, both with and without ASD; in fact we found an increased number of utterances in the narratives of bilinguals. The current findings suggest that bilingualism does not negatively affect narrative skills in children with ASD.

This contribution attempts to import the study of autism into the biolinguistics program by reviewing the current state of knowledge on its neurobiology, physiology and verbal phenotypes from a comparative vantage point. A closer look at alternative approaches to the primacy of social cognition impairments in autism spectrum disorders suggests fundamental differences in every aspect of language comprehension and production, suggesting productive directions of research in auditory and visual speech processing as well as executive control. Strong emphasis is put on the great heterogeneity of autism phenotypes, raising important caveats towards an all-or-nothing classification of autism. The study of autism brings interesting clues about the nature and evolution of language, in particular its ontological connections with musical and visual perception as well as executive functions and generativity. Success in this endeavor hinges upon expanding beyond the received wisdom of autism as a purely social disorder and favoring a “cognitive style” approach increasingly called for both inside and outside the autistic community.