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Bilingualism and ASD
Hello ladies!
I know a few of you speak another language. Do your ASD kids speak/understand it too?
Since my DS was born I spoke only my native language to him, but when we got his dx, I swithced to 'Enlish only' so that there is consistency between his therapists, nanny, me, etc.
There is no practical reason for him to speak 'my' language other than my dream of having this special knowledge of our language and culture. However I do not want to confuse him or introduce more stress into his life. My language is not Spanish and is not very common in the US.
So, it is practical and reasonalbe to speak my native language with him at all? What do you guys do?
Thank you!
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Re: Bilingualism and ASD
I work for a family who is raising bilingual children. The child with ASD has a good vocab in both languages and understands both languages...and he knows that one is spanish and one is english and if I ask "how do you say ___ in spanish" he can answer. He has beautiful pronunciation of both, as well as super phonemic awareness skills, which I think is a strength/characteristic (in his case) because of ASD not bilingualism. But really I haven't given this a lot of thought until now so I don't want to say much more on that until I think about it more
I can't help from wonder about its impact on syntax though. For the one single kid I am thinking about, syntax is a weakness, so I am wondering if exposure to the differing syntactic structures will/is making it any more difficult...
No clue really, just my initial thoughts.
Edited: I'm pro-bilingualism in 99% of scenarios.
Yes, pretty much like you....started speaking Czech-only to him when DS was born, plus my mother was here for a few months helping out while I went back to work and she only spoke Czech to him when she watched him (most of his first year).
After dx, we stoppped Czech altogether for consistency (although ST said we can continue, I just felt more comfortable getting him up to speed in one language first...and since preschool, therapists and everyone were American and we live here - English it was).
Once he got caught up in English (about a year later), I re-introduced Czech again. It's funny, but he never really forgot it. He stopped speaking it when I wasn't speaking it to him, but when we would go back home for the summer, he picked it up again gradually. First, he would answer questions in English (though he would understand what people were asking him - not always, of course) and slowly started answering in Czech-o-English and making conversation more as well. It was always in there...in the back of his brain.
These days his Czech is about 30% of what his English is. And that is ok. English is his first language (though technically he was introduced to Czech first as a baby) and it's important he's proficient in English first and foremost. He has more vocabulary in English because he naturally uses it more on a daily basis, but when family members call on skype, he can communicate with them in Czech. Also, when we go back every summer, he can communicate pretty well by week 3 or 4. And that's really all I wanted - him being able to communicate with the part of his family that is Czech. He has tons of cousins, aunts, uncles and of course grandma and grandpa that love him - and my goal was for him to be able to share his life with them and vice versa. Who cares it's not grammatically correct or whatever - they can communicate with each other and that's what matters.
Thank you everyone for your comments and suggestions! Will try to intro a few words here and there and see how it goes.
Thank you!