The Language Development Process of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Investigation into Gender Linguistic Differences

Abstract

This paper is a descriptive correlational study that investigated the gender differences in the language development process among a group of 215 male and female bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder. A valid and reliable questionnaire was adopted and deployed to accomplish the study’s objective. The caregivers of these autistic children were requested to complete and submit the questionnaire. Data analysis was made possible with the help of different statistical software tools. The study concluded that gender did significantly impact the participants’ performance in four different linguistic domains: Listening, vocabulary, verbal grammar and sentence construction, and questions formulation. Females were found to have an upper edge over their male counterparts in these domains. Only one non-significant difference was observed in the listening comprehension domain, where both genders were found to experience the same level of difficulty. The limitations and recommendations of this study have been presented here as well.