Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Comprehension of passive voice in autistic German- and French-speaking children : no negative effects of bilingualism

Published inBilingualism, p. 1-12
First online date2026-05-05
Abstract

The study examines the influence of bilingual experience, age and verbal working memory (WM) on the comprehension of passive voice by 116 typically developing (TD) and 65 autistic children aged 3 to 13, who were tested in their societal languages, German or French. Some children were mainly exposed to the societal language while some children were also exposed to other languages. We adopt a continuous approach to bilingual experience and operationalize it as a balance of cumulative exposure, measured through entropy scores. We found that the comprehension of passive voice improved with age in both groups, and higher verbal WM predicted better performance in autistic but not TD children. Although autistic children were less accurate than TD children, bilingual experience did not contribute to the differences between the two groups. These findings suggest that bilingualism has no detrimental effect on the comprehension of complex syntactic structures in autistic children.

Citation (ISO format)
ZUBAN, Yulia et al. Comprehension of passive voice in autistic German- and French-speaking children : no negative effects of bilingualism. In: Bilingualism, 2026, p. 1–12. doi: 10.1017/s1366728926101242
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1366-7289
4views
7downloads

Technical informations

Creation06/05/2026 00:30:15
First validation12/05/2026 06:12:45
Update12/05/2026 06:12:45
Status update12/05/2026 06:12:45
Last indexation12/05/2026 06:12:47
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack