Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speaker: Dr Bérengère Digard

Title: Bilingualism in autism: What about social processes?

Abstract: Autistic people experience difficulties navigating the social world – especially when interacting with non-autistic people – due to differences in social cognition. Studies in neurotypical populations found that bilingualism stimulates the development of social cognition, it is unknown whether the same relationship between bilingualism and social processes also exists in autism.

In this talk, we will first reflect on why researching bilingualism in autism is important. I will then present the findings of my PhD research investigating the effects of bilingualism on the life and social cognitive (especially perspective-taking) skills of autistic people, adopting a naturalistic and multidimensional approach of bilingualism, and disentangling the different processes included under “perspective-taking”.