Bilingualism and second-order theory of mind development in autistic children over time: Longitudinal relations with language, executive functions, and intelligence.

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children, as well as of the factors related to Theory of Mind development in autism spectrum disorder is still limited. The current study has examined first- and second-order Theory of Mind skills in 21 monolingual and 21 bilingual autistic children longitudinally across three time points, specifically at ages 6, 9, and 12, and also investigated associations between Theory of Mind trajectories and trajectories of the children's language, intelligence and executive function skills.

Assessing the Linguistic Capacity Across Alzheimer's Disease and Its Preclinical Stages: Evidence from Narrative Macrostructure in Elderly Speakers of Greek.

Background: The assessment of language deficits can be valuable in the early clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objective: The present study aims to explore whether language markers at the macrostructural level could assist with the placement of an individual across the dementia continuum employing production data from structured narratives.

Methods: We administered a Picture Sequence Narrative Discourse Task to 170 speakers of Greek: young healthy controls (yHC), cognitively intact healthy elders (eHC), elder participants with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

Language Markers of Dementia and Their Role in Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease: Exploring Grammatical and Syntactic Competence via Sentence Repetition.

Background: Earlier research focuses primarily on the cognitive changes due to Alzheimer's disease (AD); however, little is known with regard to changes in language competence across the lifespan.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate the decline of language skills at the grammatical and syntactic levels due to changes in cognitive function.

Methods: We administered the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) to 150 native speakers of Greek who fall into five groups: 1) young healthy speakers, 2) cognitively intact elder healthy speakers, 3) speakers with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), 4) speakers with mild cognitive impairment (MCI); and 5) speakers with AD dementia at the mild/moderate stages.

Disentangling Language Disorder and Bilingualism in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Writing.

Twenty-eight Albanian-Greek bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and 28 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder but no language impairment, along with 28 typically-developing, age-, Performance IQ- and socioeconomic status-matched bilingual children were asked to produce two expository texts which were coded for spelling (phonological, grammatical, orthographic) errors, stress and punctuation use. The children's expressive vocabulary, current language use and home language history were also measured. The results show that the bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder were particularly vulnerable to spelling errors, while their bilingual peers with Autism Spectrum Disorder were rather challenged by stress and punctuation.

Validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task with Typically Developing Monolingual and Bilingual Children.

This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test's ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. This is the first study to report on the psychometric evaluation of a Greek SRT and its discriminatory ability with typical populations. Since most language assessments are standardized with monolinguals and bilingual children tend to underperform on these compared to monolinguals, it is essential to establish the level of bilingual TLD children's ability on the same tests before moving on to diagnose language impairment in bilinguals.

Bilingualism effects on cognition in autistic children are not all-or-nothing: The role of socioeconomic status in intellectual skills in bilingual autistic children.

Previous research has suggested that bilingualism may improve cognition in children with autism, and that this boost may stem from improvement in executive functions. The Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children are considered to be reliable and valid measures of intelligence when administered to autistic children. These measures have so far revealed unusual psychometric properties in monolingual autistic children, notably distinctive patterns of strengths and weaknesses and low inter-correlation among verbal and nonverbal IQ subtests.

Bilingualism Effects on the Cognitive Flexibility of Autistic Children: Evidence From Verbal Dual-Task Paradigms.

The deficit in cognitive flexibility (i.e., the ability to adapt cognitive behavior to changing contexts) is one of the most prominent characteristics of autistic individuals.

The cognitive benefits of bilingualism in autism spectrum disorder: Is theory of mind boosted and by which underlying factors?

This study examined whether bilingualism boosts Theory of Mind as measured by a non-verbal false belief (FB) task in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how this potential boost may stem from improvements in a variety of other domains, namely executive functions (EFs), language, metalinguistic awareness skills, as well as autism severity. One hundred and three children with ASD (7- to 15-year-olds) (43 bilingual and 60 age- and IQ-matched monolingual children) were tested on a nonverbal task of attentional switching, working memory and updating task, and an online, low-verbal first-order FB task. Results showed a clear FB benefit for bilingual children with ASD as compared with their monolingual peers.

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition.

Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children's linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8-12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting.

Effects of executive attention on sentence processing in aphasia.

Background: In the recent years there has been increasing interest in the effects of attentional control on syntactic comprehension, as measured in garden path sentence resolution. Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience greater penalties in garden path sentences compared to language-unimpaired adults but the origin of this deficit remains a controversial issue. One of the possible deficits has been claimed to be disambiguation of lexical cues in the sentence.

Cognitive and Affective Aspects of Theory of Mind in Greek-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Substantial research indicates that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities, but rarely have studies used a comprehensive battery to measure both the cognitive and affective aspects of ToM. The present study tested this ability in 24 Greek-speaking children with ASD (ages 7-14), and their performance was compared to 24 age-, gender- and language-matched typically developing controls. Results showed that ASD children's performance was selectively impaired in both ToM aspects, supporting the distinction between ToM components.

The impact of bilingualism on the narrative ability and the executive functions of children with autism spectrum disorders.

While there is ample evidence that monolingual children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face difficulties with narrative story-telling and executive functions (EF), there is considerable uncertainty about how bilingualism impacts these skills in autism. The current study explores the effect of bilingualism on the narrative and EF skills of forty 7-to-12-year-old bilingual and monolingual children with ASD, as well as forty age-matched bilingual and monolingual children of typical development (TD). Narrative production data were elicited using the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider et al.

Morphophonology and compensation in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek.

The current study investigates the role of the morphophonological realisation of grammatical features as a compensatory mechanism for morphosyntactic deficits in specific language impairment (SLI). The phenomenon examined is past tense formation in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) and Cypriot Greek (CG) as it manifests a distinction in morphophonological salience realisation in the two linguistic varieties via differential use of a stress shift and stressed syllabic augment [é] required for past tense rule formation. Participants were pre-schoolers with typical language development (TD) and children with SLI.

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs.