Many countries profit from multicultural influences and a monolingual environment is becoming more and more impossible – especially in Luxembourg, a country so rich in cultures and languages. Here, parents tend to be advised to restrict themselves to speaking only French with their child, since French is an official language of the country and facilitates access to more care and therapeutic services. However, as many of the families concerned do not have the French nationality or consider themselves native speakers of the language, this could probably lead to uncertainty, distress, and complications regarding their interactions with their children.

Thus, Luxembourg represents the perfect environment for the analysis of the relationship between multilingualism and social skills of autistic children in order to improve the guidance and support of families, their caregivers, and educational and therapeutic staff.

Most of the research with autistic children mentioned above is based on single case studies. Therefore, this research project sought to investigate the potential effect of multilingualism on social skills and relationships of autistic children in a larger sample.

The data for this research was collected via an online questionnaire, which was offered in German, English, and French. The first part of the questionnaire included questions on the demographics, the linguistic proficiency, and education of the parent and the child respectively. Subsequently, parents were asked to report on the quality of communication with their child, whether they were given any advice on language use, and whether they agreed with these recommendations and why. The questionnaire also contained the Autism Spectrum Quotient-Child version (AQ-Child) questionnaire and the second edition of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2). The questionnaire had to be completed by a parent or legal guardian of the child.

Our statistical analysis could not find any significant differences in children’s social skills depending on what and how many languages were spoken to them. This means that children’s abilities in social skills did not differ whether parents used only their mother tongue, only a foreign language, their mother tongue and other languages, or multiple languages without their mother tongue.

However, language use was found to impact how parents reported on their ability to feel comfortable, authentic, and free to express themselves in interaction with their children. Our results indicated that parents using only their mother tongue felt significantly more comfortable, authentic, and able to express themselves freely than the parents of all other groups. Parents using only a foreign language felt significantly less comfortable and authentic than all other parents. We did not find any significant differences between monolingual households and multilingual households, no matter whether they used their mother tongue or not. Lastly, parents using their mother tongue felt significantly more comfortable and authentic than parents using foreign languages, independent from whether they used only one or multiple languages.

In our study, language use was not related to social skills in autistic children. Furthermore, we found that households using only one language and households using multiple languages did not differ significantly on parents’ ability to feel comfortable, authentic, and to express themselves freely.

However, parents who did not use their mother tongue felt significantly less comfortable and authentic when interacting with their child, both when they used only one foreign language and multiple foreign languages. 

Therefore, our results indicate that the common advice to use only one language (often a foreign one) does not provide social skills benefits for children and may actually have negative implications for the parents’ ability to communicate adequately with their children and thus probably influence the parent-child dynamic and relationship. 

This study has been approved by the ethics committee of the University of Luxembourg: ERP 20-019 SSMCA