They are going to be bilingual

Families with children with intellectual disabilities often find themselves at a crossroads of deciding whether raising their child in a monolingual environment would be better than doing so in a bilingual one. This decision is not always easy for these families; since, for many years, they have been dissuaded by different professionals from raising their child bilingually under the assumption that speaking more than one language would be counterproductive for their child. However, the limited research aimed at investigating the effects of bilingualism in individuals with genetic disorders causing intellectual disabilities does not support this practice. The results within this field of research are scarce but consistent in not showing negative effects of bilingualism for individuals with Down syndrome or Prader–Willi syndrome, among others. 

Families with typically developing children do not face this dilemma because multilingualism is a valued trait in our global society. Why, then, are individuals with intellectual disabilities being discouraged from becoming bilingual? As other researchers have pointed out, there is still a gap between what research shows and what professionals are still recommending in some countries. The study presented here aims to add to the literature intended to close the existent gap.

In Garcia–Alcaraz and Liceras (2024), the authors investigate and compare the linguistic and metalinguistic abilities (in Spanish) of Spanish–Catalan bilingual speakers and Spanish monolingual speakers with Prader–Willi syndrome. For these bilingual speakers, Catalan was predominantly their dominant language and Spanish their non-dominant language. Given the profile of these bilingual speakers, the authors predicted that when comparing the linguistic abilities of bilingual and monolingual speakers, the bilingual speakers would show linguistic shortcomings in Spanish as it was their non-dominant language. On the other hand, when evaluating the participants’ metalinguistic abilities, a potential “bilingual advantage” was anticipated; since, as different researchers have pointed out, bilingual speakers are used to dealing with two languages, which makes them more sensitive to an early and better understanding of the arbitrariness of language. This, together with the proposed bilingual capacity to ignore one language by concentrating on the other, would make bilingual speakers better at metalinguistic abilities.

Results showed comparable linguistic and metalinguistic abilities in Spanish for Spanish–Catalan bilingual speakers and Spanish monolingual speakers with Prader–Willi Syndrome. Contrary to previous studies within this field of research, these findings are novel in showing that bilingual speakers can mirror monolingual speakers even in their non-dominant language, which does not indicate a detrimental effect of bilingualism but rather the contrary: similar performance in the bilinguals’ weaker language. However, it should be acknowledged that Catalan and Spanish are two environmental languages in Catalonia (a Spanish–Catalan bilingual autonomous community of Spain) that belong to the same linguistic family—the Romance languages. Consequently, more research is needed to determine whether these findings can be replicated in (i) bilingual speakers of different language pairs, including languages from different linguistic families, and (ii) in bilingual speakers with intellectual disabilities due to other genetic disorders. 

Contact researcher(s):

Estela Garcia-Alcaraz  estela.garcia@uib.es

Juana M. Liceras jliceras@uottawa.ca