The Effect of Bilingualism and Executive Functions on the Microstructure Elements of Stories Narrated by Bilingual Kurdish-Persian Autistic Children

Although there are a lot of evidence that refer to the problems of mono-lingual autistic children’s problem in telling stories and executive functions (EFs), there are not enough information regarding the effect of bilingualism on these skills in bilingual children specifically Iranian bilingual children. The present research investigated and compared the effect of bilingualism on the story telling and EFs of twenty 7-12 years old bilingual and monolingual autistic children and 20 bilingual and monolingual normal children. The stories were analyzed with regard to their microstructure elements. Also, two EF tasks namely, a global-local visual attention task and a 2-back working memory task were administered to the same children. The findings of the study showed that bilingual autistic children outperformed their mono-lingual peers in story structure complexity and the use of adverbial clauses. In the global-local visual attention task and a 2-back working memory task, bilingual autistic children were faster and more accurate than their monolingual peers who were more susceptible to inference from local information in compare to other experimental groups. The speed and accuracy of bilingual autistic children were higher in compare to those of their monolingual peers in 2-back task. The correlational analysis between storytelling and EF skills showed that bilingual autistic children in compare to their monolingual peers drew on a broader range of EF in narrating stories. The results of the research showed that bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers in the production of microstructure elements, visual attention and the working memory skills.