ASA - Academic success in autism: The impact of emotions and multilingualism

Autistic children tend to perform worse at school than their abilities would suggest. With the ASA project, we aim to understand why this happens.

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Jan 2020
Duration in months:

45
Funding:

FNR
Principal Investigator(s):

Andreia COSTA

About

Academic success is determined by numerous individual and socio-economic factors that are difficult to control and some children perform worse than their capacities would predict. Among these, many autistic children often have worse academic outcomes than expected given their cognitive abilities which can create repercussions in their life outcomes and well-being that can extend to adolescence and adulthood. Even though the research on the reasons for the academic underachievement of children with autism is scarce, we hypothesize that it may be due to external factors such as pedagogical practices as well as individual factors such as the children’s socio-emotional difficulties. Indeed, research with neurotypical children shows that problems with emotion regulation are linked to impairments in cognitive processes that lead to poorer academic performance and autistic children have frequent emotion regulation difficulties. Furthermore, teachers report that autistic children present frequent behavioural and emotional problems in the classroom. In addition, language and cognitive processes are interconnected and emotions can foster that relation. Therefore, proficiency in different languages and the language in which multilingual children express their emotions may have an impact on cognitive processes such as children’s memory. Given Luxembourg’s multilingual context, it is important to understand the potential effects emotions and language can have in children’s cognitive and academic performance. The aim of this project is to first assess the link between emotional ability and multilingualism, to cognitive and academic performance among autistic and neurotypical children. Second, it aims to understand how the expression of emotions in different languages (mother tongue vs second language) can affect the academic and cognitive performance of children. The results of the ASA project will enable to better understand factors affecting the academic underachievement of children with autism and define strategies to tackle it.

Autism.uni.lu