School of Education and Languages
When Emily Ge Haoyan came to Hong Kong to pursue postgraduate studies, she became fascinated by one of the city's unique characteristics: the great extent to which people in the city are bilingual. Now, with an MPhil and PhD in linguistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, both focusing on bilingualism, Ge, an Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Languages at Hong Kong Metropolitan University (HKMU) has found that her curiosity about the role of language in our understanding of the world has only grown. In particular, she focuses on how children acquire two languages, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes sequentially.
“I’m interested in the language and also the cognitive development of the speakers, especially in children,” says Ge. “I don’t think bilingualism will change your IQ, it won't make you smarter, but there are executive functions, such as shifting from one task to another, that bilingual people are probably quicker at and find it easier to do, because they need to switch between languages.”
Ge appreciated the diversity that bilingualism also leads to, the access to more than one culture, and to different opportunities, not only at an individual level, but at the societal level. From this appreciation of diversity, Ge's interest naturally expanded to neurodiversity, specifically children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She took the opportunity to complete autism assessment training in Cambridge, and armed with both this qualification and her expertise in bilingualism, she set about addressing a gap in the current literature: how bilingualism plays out in autistic children.
“Speech therapists and clinical psychologists had expressed concern about whether they should advise parents or teachers of autistic children to speak two languages at home and school. All they could say to the parents and teachers was based on their own observations or experience, but it’s not scientific evidence. So that also motivated me to look at bilingual autistic children in Hong Kong,” says Ge.
The pressing question from both parents and the professionals helping them was: do bilingual autistic children have more language difficulties than autistic children who are monolingual or less bilingual?
“By language difficulties, I mean autistic children commonly have problems in understanding and responding, for example, in terms of prosody (the intonation of stress patterns or your speech), or interpreting the intended meaning of a question,” says Ge. For example, if you call someone's home and ask if they are home, the person who picks up the phone will understand that you want to talk to that person. “If an autistic child picks up the phone, if I say, 'Hey, Is your mom at home?' he will say yes, and then he will hang up because he feel like he already answered the question. So this is kind of language difficulties we need to look at,” she explains.
In 2020, under her first major funding award from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) Faculty Development Scheme (FDS), Ge and her co-investigators conducted a study of four groups of school-age children in Hong Kong: neurotypical children who were bilingual or monolingual, and autistic children who were bilingual or monolingual. The study found that in terms of their Cantonese exposure, all the four groups are very similar, i.e., they receive very similar levels of Cantonese exposure at home, at school and in the community. But looking at English exposure, autistic children were significantly less exposed than neurotypical children in both monolingual and bilingual groups. “It's very apparent that the parents choose to speak less to autistic children with English, and we wanted to see if being bilingual actually does or does not affect their ability in the first language, Cantonese,” says Ge.
The study looked at the Cantonese abilities in all four groups of children, under very controlled experimental conditions, and then looked at the relationship between the amount of English exposure they had, and their language skills in Cantonese, to see what kind of exposure might influence performance in their first language.
“We found that both monolingual and bilingual autistic children do perform worse than neurotypical monolingual and bilingual children, so they do have more language difficulties overall,” says Ge. “We also found no significant difference between the two autistic groups (monolingual and bilingual with ASD). In most tasks, their performance was very similar, and in one production task, bilingual autistic children actually performed better than monolingual autistic children. We also look at the relationship between English exposure and their Cantonese performance, and we didn’t find any significant correlation. So English exposure doesn’t help or hinder. It doesn’t have any effect on their Cantonese.”
Under a second FDS grant, Ge and her co-investigators then looked at how bilingualism might affect the cognitive abilities of autistic children. “We found that the more English exposure autistic children have, especially at home, the better inhibitory control they will have. So the language environment really matters a lot,” says Ge.
The projects had help from the Heep Hong Society and parent groups of autistic children. The parents were interested to know more about how they could help their children, and appreciated access to a gold standard ASD assessment, something which gives them vital information about the severity of their child's autism, a crucial step towards getting them to help they need. Such assessments are expensive in the private sector, and require a long waiting period in the public sector.
Still, it was challenging to recruit participants, especially as the start of the first project coincided with the arrival of Covid-19 in the city. However, the team developed a reliable pool of participants in the first project and stayed in touch with them, which then helped them recruit preschool children for the second study. “If a child has ASD, the chances of their younger sibling having it are higher, so over the years we've built up quite good network of parents who are willing to participate, so we asked them if there were any siblings,” explains Ge.
Six years on from the first major study, Ge is gearing up for a third project, still on autistic children, but looking at how sleep may influence their language acquisition, on the basis that sleep will definitely influence cognitive abilities, and cognitive abilities closely related to language.
Ge's research is not only filling the gap in existing linguistic and psychology literature, it is also directly helping the families who participate. Raising an autistic child is often fraught with difficulties, and parents worry about whether or not they are doing the right things to best help their children. Ge has a message for parents of autistic children who worry that bilingualism might be an additional challenge for their children, not a benefit.
“I would say, you can definitely speak two languages with your kids, and not worry that there will be extra language delays, or language impairment arising from bilingualism, and that home exposure is particularly important.. I think we have to give the parents the choice.
“It’s not like you have to speak English. If you are non-native speakers of English, it's not something that’s going to make their autism better or worse. But more English exposure at home may increase their executive functions. Speaking English at home is actually good, and it’s not something that you can just leave to the school if you really want to get the benefits, it's something that you can think about introducing in your home. It's another form of enrichment that families can consider.”
Ge's work has made her acutely aware of the struggles parents of autistic children face, and she has teamed up with a colleague at the School of Nursing and Health Sciences, Wendy Zhang Wen . They were funded by the Health Bureau to develop a smartphone app-based platform for parents to talk with both a specialized chatbot and with fellow parents about their own situation, and the problems they face. “Sometimes, when we are doing the testing with the children, and we meet the parents, especially the moms, I feel they are very desperate, and they need a lot of help,” Ge says.
Thinking back to the very early stages her academic career, Ge never imagined that in a field as broad as linguistics, she would find this particular niche. Now with deep research expertise in this field, she has much to share with her students too.
“Our students are language or early childhood education majors, so they may be teachers in the future, and I think this kind of information is crucial for them to deal with students with special educational needs later in their career,” says Ge. “I think another important impact of my research to my teaching is that I developed from scratch the Master of Science in Communication Sciences and Child Language Disorders, in close collaboration with our Dean, Prof. Andy Chin. We’re doing pretty well in terms of the student admission and that’s basically the first programme of its kind in Greater China that is focusing on Mandarin-speaking children with language disorders, whereas other programmes in Hong Kong focus on Cantonese-speaking populations.”
With the launch of the new MSc programme, Ge would like to expand her research to autistic children in mainland China too, as awareness of ASD is still low there, especially in rural areas. “Recent research found prevalence of ASD is around 1%, but most of the research was done in the cities, so we don’t know the rural area of China. We expect that the percentage is actually higher,” Ge says.
