Multilingual children have better executive function skills, study finds

WASHINGTON: Speaking more than one language may benefit children’s executive function — especially those with autism spectrum disorder, a recent analysis suggests, the Washington Post reported.

The study, published in Autism Research, looked at 116 children ages 7 through 12. Of those, 53 had autism spectrum disorder and 63 did not, though four children were later excluded. Twenty-one of the children with ASD spoke more than one language, and 35 of the typically developing children were multilingual. Most of the multilingual children spoke English and Spanish, though some spoke Portuguese, Hebrew, French, Japanese or Bulgarian in addition to English.

The researchers tested the children’s executive function abilities and asked parents to fill out questionnaires assessing autism symptoms such as perspective taking — the ability to understand perspectives other than one’s own — and social communication. The multilingual children all demonstrated better executive function than their counterparts who spoke just one language, regardless of whether they were on the autism spectrum. But the effect was stronger for multilingual kids with ASD diagnoses, who had significantly higher impulse control than their single-language counterparts on the autism spectrum.

The research also found a “direct and indirect association between multilingualism and perspective taking.” This could be because people who speak more than one language must assess social cues to decide which language to speak or that their knowledge of more than one language comes with a higher ability to understand language itself, the researchers said.

Multilingual children’s executive functions could be honed by the need to choose the right language to speak, the researchers write.