Children on the autism spectrum often struggle to complete their education in unspecialized schools, even when their intellectual abilities would suggest differently (Manti et al., 2011). We seek to identify which factors may contribute to the academic outcomes of autistic children. Social skills have been identified to significantly influence academic outcomes in neurotypical children (Meier et al., 2006) as well as in autistic children (Miller et al., 2017). However, this may be even more pertinent in autistic children as they tend to struggle with socio-emotional skills (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and to face social exclusion more often than their neurotypical peers (Humphrey & Lewis, 2008). Since children learn social skills for a major part in interaction with their parents (Ladd, 2005) and parents of autistic children were found to interact significantly less with their children than parents of neurotypical children (Costa et al., 2019), children on the autism spectrum may be exposed to an even more increased risk for academic underachievement. Meanwhile, the reduced interaction could relate to findings, stating that parents and especially mothers of autistic children have a higher incidence of negative psychological outcomes (depression, anxiety, emotional distress) than parents of neurotypical children (Mugno et al., 2007).

Furthermore, living in a multilingual environment, such as is increasingly the case worldwide but particularly in countries such as Luxembourg, while having impaired (pragmatic) language skills (Miller et al., 2017), autistic children may face additional challenges in social communication and academic achievement. Language barriers may impede their participation in class and understanding of academic content and thus hinder proper socialization and integration among their peers. The choice of language(s) could further influence children’s cognition since language was found to be tightly interrelated with cognitive concepts and the categorization of abstract information (Perlovsky, 2009a). For example, categorical perception of color in prelinguistic babies was found to be based in the right cerebral hemisphere. However, when starting language acquisition and learning of lexical color terminologies, categorical perception of color transitions, such that adults’ categorical perception of color is based in the left hemisphere, where language mechanisms are located (Franklin et al., 2008).

In addition, the degree of parents’ familiarity with the language used to interact with their autistic child was found to play a role in parents’ ability to feel comfortable, authentic, and free to express themselves (Franco et al., in preparation). Thus, the language used in autism families may affect the parent-child relationship, the overall family dynamic, and the mental health of family members (Jegatheesan, 2011). Language was also found to influence emotion expression abilities, such that languages have different levels of emotionality (Guttfreund 1990; Perlovsky, 2009b) and that our most intense emotions are often, and sometimes instinctively, expressed in our mother tongue (Zentella, 1997). In line with this previous research, the present study investigates the interrelation between autistic children’s language, socio-emotional skills, parent-child relationship, and academic outcomes.

The study is in the final phase of data collection and as of today includes 15 autistic children and 10 age- and gender-matched neurotypical peers attending mainstream elementary schools in Luxembourg. For each child, one of their parents and their class teacher participated as well. Children were tested with a battery of different psychological tests regarding their cognitive abilities (i.e. IQ, attention, visual processing, and inhibition) and were asked to watch a sad movie clip (extract from the movie The Lion King (1994), dying scene of the father), during which the researchers assess the children’s heart rate using a wrist-worn heart rate monitor, a structured interview, and the self-assessment manikin for emotional valence. Thereupon, an educational video clip (extract from the German television program Sendung mit der Maus by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln), available in the language of academic instruction of the child (German, French, or English), and questions about the clip’s content were used to assess the children’s memory abilities. At last, the children reported on their perception of their social integration at school. Parents answered questions about the family’s socio-demographics, their child’s ASD diagnosis, substance intake, and language skills. They then completed questionnaires on their child’s socio-emotional skills, their general behavior, their perceived inclusion at school, their parent-child relationship, and their own mental health. Teachers reported on the children’s language proficiency and academic achievement and informed as well about children’s socio-emotional skills, their general behavior, their perceived inclusion at school, and their teacher-child relationship. The data of this study is to be analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics, Version 28 (IBM Corporation, 2021). Correlational, moderational/mediational, and regression analyses will be run for the interrelations of language, cognition, socio-emotional skills, and parent-child relationships. Regressions will be run following the theoretical background and correlational findings. For the difference between the data of autistic children and neurotypical children, analyses of variances are used to give a better insight regarding the main relations between their different abilities and their academic outcome and establish a general linear model, integrating the overall findings.

We expect that findings will show that children’s increased familiarity with the language of academic instruction positively relates to better academic outcomes and that the use of additional languages does either not or positively relate to their academic outcomes. We hypothesize that autistic children who use suppression, as compared to those who use reappraisal, have poorer subsequent performance in a cognition task. Meanwhile, this relation could moderate the general relation between cognitive skills and academic outcomes. We hypothesize that impairment of children’s socio-emotional skills negatively relates to children’s perception of inclusion in the academic environment and their academic outcomes. We further expect to find that impaired parent mental health may have an impact on children’s academic outcomes. Children’s impaired socio-emotional skills are further expected to negatively correlate with the parent's mental health and the parent-child relationship. Parents’ and children’s familiarity with the language used at home is expected to influence parents’ mental health and the parent-child relationship, and thus subsequently expected to influence children’s socio-emotional skills. The findings of this study will be used for a better understanding of autistic children’s needs for support in the academic environment and guidance of (all) families living in a multilingual setting.

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