We are the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, or ACAMH for short. And this is ACAMH Learn. Welcome to Mind the Kids podcast. So how can autistic children spontaneously use language that aren't spoken at home or in their social circles? What might this tell us about the way language develops differently in autism? Today we'll be exploring a fascinating and surprising topic in an episode entitled, "When language surprises unexpected bilingualism in autism." I'm Mark Tebbs. I'm your host for today. I spent my whole career working in mental health from frontline service delivery to director of mental health commissioning. I'm currently chief executive of a charity. I'm a trustee at a mental health organisation and a career coach. And I'm delighted to be hosting these podcasts because I get to speak to clinicians and academics at the forefront of children and young people's mental health. Joining me to unravel this mystery are two exceptional guests Dr. Alexia Ostrolenk, a postdoctoral fellow with Autism Alliance in Canada, and David Gagnon, a resident psychiatrist and PhD candidate in Montreal. Together, they will shed light on how these unique language experiences challenge established ideas about language acquisition and the social interaction in autism, as detailed in their JCPP paper. Whether you're a parent, clinician, educator, researcher, this episode will offer fresh insights, inspiring stories, and practical reflections on supporting language and communication development in children on the autism spectrum. So let's dive in. Let's get started. Alexia, David, welcome. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you today. Alexia, David, really welcome to the podcast. Really looking forward to our conversation. Yeah. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Yes, it's a pleasure to be there. Brilliant. So let's start with some introductions. So it'd be great if you could just tell us your name, where you work, and maybe a few of your research interests. Alexia, do you want to start us off there? So my name is Alexia Ostrolenk. I'm originally from France, but I live in Montreal, Quebec, and I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Autism Alliance of Canada. And my work is mostly about the development of language and reading skills in autistic children. David. Yes. So my name is David Gagnon. So I'm a researcher here in Montreal in Quebec, Canada. I'm actually a resident doctor in psychiatry also and I'm doing my PhD right now. So I'm a candidate of my PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Laurent Mottron in Montreal. My research interests more focuses on two aspects. One of it is the language acquisition and the other one is the semiology of autism and psychiatric disorders. OK. Brilliant. So really looking forward to our conversation. So we're going to start with just setting the scene. So the paper is about unexpected bilingualism in autistic children. So could you explain what that means? And maybe give us an example of what that would look like. To give you a simple definition of unexpected bilingualism, I think I might say UB from now on just so that we don't repeat unexpected bilingualism, so UB. It's when a child uses a language that is not spoken in their social environment, as in it's not spoken at home or at school or in any place where they might interact with other people. And an example of that would be, for example, we've had children who lived in households where they spoke French and Arabic. They went to school in French, but then they started speaking English spontaneously without it being a language present around them. So if I understand this correctly, in typical development, children learn language through social interaction with their peers, within their family situation. So what does your study suggest about how language develops in autistic children that might follow like a different nonsocial pathway? It's actually I would say an interesting field of research because that's a complex question. There's been a lot of work in the neurotypical children about how they may learn languages and there's theories behind that. And one of the, I would say, major dominant current is about their social interaction or essential for neurotypical children to learn language. And one of the, I would say, catalysts of this is because being into interaction will drive social interaction and then drive communication to one point, which will lead children to be exposed to language and to use language at one point, which will make them better at one point to use and learn language. What is different with autistic children is having difficulties in social reciprocity or interaction is one of the major domain of autism itself. So at one point, the reason is-- the thing is if they do have difficulties in social interaction, will it impact their language? So that question have been through a hypothesis and theories that have been major in the field of autism for the last decade, saying that their difficulties in language are derived from their difficulties in social interaction, which explains that most of autistic children, specifically the ones that what we call prototypical or what used to be infantile autism in the past, is they do have a language delay. So the reason that people were thinking so they have a language delay because they don't have the exposition they should have because they had difficulties in interaction with other people. But the point is, and I think that's where it goes with an expected bilingualism, is that some of them are able to learn language and to get at the level that is higher than what it could be expected for their age. This level may be acquired later, some of them, the most I would say special of them have a plateau. So they even have example few words then regress or lose their words and then a plateau. Or they not even produce their first words and there's a plateau where there's minimal use of language. Some knowledge of vocabularies, but not a full use of generative complex language in communication. And then at one point, example towards the age of 4 to 6 years old usually, they have a catch up of their language. So they fast from being delayed to in 2 years, getting higher than the level that is expected for their age. So this is massive. But the problem is they still have difficulties in social interaction. So how this is possible. And that's where it comes into question-- how this is possible, it might say that there's a different strategies for learning languages that may bypass this phenomenon of where they need the social interaction to learn language. And an expected bilingualism is probably the extreme of this path, saying there are some of them that are showing us by the fact that they can learn a language that is not spoken in their environment, that they're showing us they can acquire this language without social interaction. So now we have to deal with that when we're thinking about autism. And that's what it's so interesting when we think about this phenomenon. So is unexpected bilingualism, does it challenge that notion that the delay in language acquisition is because of social interaction delays? Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. But it's at least for autism. We cannot say that this is true for non-autistic people. But we can say that at least it is possible for autistic children and probably not to the same degree for everyone. So that's why we have to be careful in what we're saying. We're not saying that all autistic children learn language through a non-social or non-interactive way. We're saying that some of them can. Which means that some of them might be in between or-- and this is also possible that even those that are able to learn language without social interaction are probably also able to benefit from some social interaction and through their learning of language. There's been a study by Fountain in the 2012 where they showed that when they catch up, usually their social reciprocity and, I would say, their social abilities are also increasing at the same time as their language levels are increasing or communicative levels are increasing. So there's a relation for both of them. And if we go to our study that we've done, I mean, most of the children that were using unexpected languages were also able to use to some degree the language that is spoken in their social environment. So we cannot say that when they speak the language that isn't in their environment that this come from non-social way. It could be. It could be possible that this is completely non-social acquisition. But we cannot say that-- it's possible also that there are benefits from social interaction for their own language. Alexia, I see you nodding in there. I don't know whether you wanted to add anything at that point. I think David covered a lot. One thing that I find particularly interesting here is that we know that typically developing children cannot acquire a language without some social interaction. And so this phenomenon is unique in the way that it might be something that autistic kids can do that typical kids cannot. And I find that refreshing in a way, to look at autism as something that's not just deficits and issues and look at skills that are unique to autism. David, you mentioned this plateau phenomenon. Could you explain what the significance of that kind of plateau period is, and what the significance of that is in relation to UB? I would say two points with that question. One is we observe that the children that are showing the plateau are usually the more prototypical ones. By that I don't mean that autistic children that don't have language delay or plateau are not autistic, that's definitely not what I mean. I mean that most of them that are prototypical show a high degree of clinical certainty or evidence of manifestation of autism. So these children usually or often show a plateau in their language. That was close to the definition of what Kanner was suggesting in the '40s. So they have a language delay. Those was also a criteria in the DSM-III, for example. So that's what's central in the definition and the first perception of what is autism in the children. So the first question why I put accent on that is because UB is probably more manifested into prototypical children. So the ones that are showing the plateau are probably more prone to have this-- to show this phenomenon of an expected bilingualism. But the other question is-- so we clarified some of these points with the study we've done is when does an expected bilingualism happen? We call it bilingualism, but this is not necessarily bilingualism because some of these children would only use the unexpected language. Most of them use both, the language dominant in their social environment and some unexpected language. And at one point, it can become to a chimaera. So they mix the two of language, or they might choose one over the other. Often they choose or they go for the dominant language in their environment when they get fully developed. But we don't have a lot of study for that. This is more observation and there's some data about it also. Often the work done by Christine laboratory research in Belgium. So if it's something that happened, and some of them could only speak one language that is not spoken in their social environment we mean, it possibly happens really close to the same developmental age that where we can expect language to be developed in neurotypical children. I mean, the people that are wired, I would say, or they burn their wires similarly if they have autism or not. So at one point, the milestones we're expecting in typical children may happen also in autistic children. But if we start from there and we're making the hypothesis that we may not see what is happening or the milestone itself, or for example, if we go further than that and we put the hypotheses that are quite driving our work is saying that languages there is intact, but it's not necessarily oriented toward language. So what the cognitive resources that are useful and necessary for language may be derived to other sources of information in their environment that shares the same similarities or structural similarities than language. So they're able to-- so they can be reused or reoriented towards different types of stimuli that share the same structural information. So that could be example written language. This is probably the most evident one that we can have to clarify this hypothesis. But there's other possibilities such as pattern recognition or hierarchical embedding. So kind of structural properties that you can find in language, but you can also find in the visual field. And this is where I go to why it's closed-- when I come back to your question, where in the plateau. The plateau is usually between 2 and 6 years old in autistic children. Language development is usually between 1 years old and 4 years old. So you have the overlap between these two periods. So if we expect that development of-- the resources essential for language are being developed during this period so they can allow the catch up after all because the cognitive resources are developed, they might be trained on different things, such as example, written language, where it comes to why we and Alexia may add on that, so why they are so interested about letters and why letters might be at one point useful for them to learn language. And so I think what David is saying is that even though this plateau looks like there is no acquisition of language skills, it's just an appearance. But it's possible that there is some kind of accumulation of knowledge related to language just through different modes and through different inputs. And it also challenges the idea that this plateau is non-developmental, that nothing happens in terms of language during that period. It's probably not true. It's just that it happens differently and we may not be able to identify it in the same way as clear language development in a typical child. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's turn a little bit more to your study. Let's do a little bit more of a kind of deep dive into how you went about studying this phenomenon. Could you just describe your methodology? So for this study, we developed a questionnaire that's called the QIMET. It's in French. And what we did-- so this questionnaire asks caregivers of children about their kids' interests, language development, what they say, what they don't say. It's specifically targeted on letters and numbers. So do they know letters? Do they know numbers? Do they recognise them? Do they sing the alphabet song? All kinds of questions about that. And in which language do they do it? And then we also ask which languages are spoken in the social environment, at home, at school. And there can be several languages in different percentages. And what we did-- so we work in an autism assessment clinic in Montreal, where families are referred for an autism assessment if there were some signs that could suggest autism. We called all of the families that came over a four-year period. So that's about 700 families. And the one that the ones that accepted, we called them to go through this questionnaire. And that's 340 families, I believe. And so this sample consists of kids who were eventually diagnosed with autism, kids who were referred to the clinic but were not diagnosed with autism, but probably have some signs of autism and obtain an alternative diagnosis. The most often it was some kind of language-related delay, but also ADHD and other behavioural concerns. And then we recruited a typically developing comparison group in the same geographical area so that their characteristics would be similar. Is that clear? Yeah. So a four-year period, all the referrals into the autism assessment service. And then you group them into the three categories of children that ended up with an autistic diagnosis. So I think you describe it as a clinical group. Yeah. We called it clinical to make it simple. Sure. And then a kind of a non-diagnostic group. So you've kind of got the three. So what were you hoping to do by using the three comparisons? What was that showing you in your methodology? The idea was to make sure that what we found out about autism was specific to autism. And because we're interested in language and most of the kids were referred to the clinic have some kind of language delay or impairment, it allowed us to have a group that has language impairments but is not autistic, so that any finding about language autism is exactly about language in autism and not language in a population of kids with a language delay. Yeah. That's clear. So what were the findings? What were the key findings from your work? Do you want to take that, David? Yeah, sure. I think one of the most impressive findings is, as Alexia said, we focus on letters and numbers or language that was used to name or sing-- name letters, numbers, sing the alphabet. The reason why behind that is we found in the previous research that the interest towards letters and numbers were not delayed in the one that developed a certain level of literacy. Which means that even if language could be delayed, the knowledge of letters, numbers, and this interest in overall is not delayed and often happens before the age of 3 years old in most children, even if they're autistic or not. So when we designed this experiment, we focuses on children between the age of 2 to 6 years old, so during the plateau period, where they are minimally verbal. So the question is, do they use some language or vocabulary in their minimal amount of vocabulary they use in another language? Because there are some data about unexpected bilingualism in fully speaking children. So children that were using a more mature language and they were able to differentiate, example, the grammar they use or the language they use to speak and to see if there's an overlap between the two languages example, the unexpected one and the one that is used in the social environment. So in our study, we were more aware of what happened-- is there some unexpected bilingualism in the vocabulary or the minimal amount of language that so-called, minimally speaking, children or autistic children are. So when we've been to our study, the first thing we observe is when we try to find-- we're asking the parents in which language the children use to name letters out loud. Example, more than 30%, so more than a third of the autistic children, were showing this unexpected language. And for some of them, the language they were using was even a language that it's not understand or not spoken by their parents at all. So this is really impressive. And this level of difference is more than twice what we observe in non-autistic children. Actually, when we control for age, there's four odds of higher risk of showing unexpected bilingualism for autistic children, even in the plateau period, I would say, where most of the children included in our study were considered minimally verbal. And if we go further than that, where we've been through is saying, OK, so we understand that unexpected bilingualism is the extreme of a continuum on a nonsocial language acquisition. In Quebec we have a special status here because it's a francophone province in mostly anglophone country. So there's a lot of English speaking in the social environment in the child, whether they're francophone or not in Montreal. So the thing is we did another analysis where we did control for the language spoken in the environment, the amount of English spoken in the environment, and we compared the autistic children to the typically developing children. And looking at does the risk of speaking English or using English is higher for autistic children. What we found is autistic children were eight times more prone to use English than French, even if their family were French or francophone. And when we look at the interaction between the amount of social language spoken in the environment, we found that there are more affected-- they are less affected. Sorry. So autistic children are less affected by the social language spoken in the environment when it comes to choose the language they will use to name letters and numbers. And one thing I would like to add about that, as David said, we found that the autistic kids were four times more likely to speak in unexpected language, eight times more likely to speak a non-dominant language. But I still believe that these numbers are conservative and that we might be underestimating the real amount because we're talking about a language that the parents do not expect, do not speak, with kids who are minimally speaking and who may use also some jargon and fake languages. So I believe that there's also a proportion of the kids where parents were not able to tell us that they were using another language that we might have missed. As in, our numbers are impressive, but I think the real-life numbers are even bigger than what we found. Yeah. I was wondering how it was-- how the families reacted to this. What was the reaction from the families? How did they explain it? Oh, they're often surprised. Some of them didn't find out until another person that speaks a language told them. They're like, oh, your child is counting in Spanish at daycare because one of the daycare workers was Spanish speaking and the parents were like, no, we don't speak Spanish. There's no one who speaks Spanish. There's no way. So there's disbelief. Sometimes there is distress when the child will refuse to speak the language that the family speaks. We have a few children who, for example, would exclusively want to use English, although the family do not speak English. And that could be hard to deal with when you're already struggling to communicate with your child. But yeah, mostly, as I said before, I think it's important to frame that as an ability or a sign that there is some language acquisition and something that could be positive if further developed. Did you want to add anything, David? No. You're good. So the study also looked at UB independent of expressive language level. Why was that finding significant? As I said before, most of the studies that have been done already were on children that were speaking, I would say, enough language to be able to understand them, or they were able to make some sentences or communicate with the unexpected language. So we might say that this is actually a second language they learn because they have developed the ability, the faculty of language. So since they have developed enough of what makes possible the learning of a language, they might be able to develop a second language, or L2, which would be the unexpected one, but they are helped by what they've developed before for another language, the one that is socially dominant. But what we found is that the language spoken was not related to the level of language speaking by the child. Some children were having example language limited to letters and numbers. Some were having only echolalic or stereotyped language to make clear what stereotype language is the use of language that it seems, such as a copy of something they've heard before or it seems unintuitive, I would say, to the parents, so they can track back where this is coming from. Or sometimes only isolated word, full sentences, or full language communicated. When we look at between all these different categories, the unexpected bilingualism was not overrepresented in one level to the other. So what it tells us is this is something that is not specific to a certain level. It's not even if-- because I said about the hypothesis that could be a second language that is learned, but we can reverse it, that some people may say just something they memorise when they are younger, such as something that they not develop or they don't extract, I would say, the information behind it. Just something kind of the sound they memorise and they are repeating. So we are observing this mastery of unexpected language through all different kind of level of mastery of full language, which makes it more important for hypothesis saying that this might be related to the progress of the full development of a full language or first language for those children. So are you saying that unexpected bilingualism is a sign of or is a pathway to the development of a mastery of full language? It's not just copying sounds. It's not just responding to things that they hear through YouTube or on the television. It could. I mean, we have to be careful on what we're saying. We need to be not too fast in our assumption about it. But at some point, it could for some children. And now we have to deal with that and to go further and make more investigation and how it makes it possible, how it can help the development of full language. Because, as I said, most of them are switching to another language, at least for the data we have right now, which means how it can help to this transition, why it goes to this transition. So those are questions we still need to investigate. But for some of them, it could probably the entry into language or structure of language, or it can at least simulate the functions or cognitive functions that are essential for further language development. And what's interesting in our sample is that we have children of different ages and different language levels. And so the fact that UB is present in all of the different language levels and is also present at different degrees, as in some kids will just have a few words but some kids will actually learn to speak a language that is not in their social environment, I think it points to this alternative pathway towards language that is not just repeating a few words and there's more to it. For parents or teachers, what are the kind of observable signs of a child acquiring language through that kind of non-interactive exposure? It's a hard one because, as I said earlier, sometimes it might not be easy to spot. One thing is well, obviously, when you hear a language that is never heard by this child in a social environment, you can probably assume that they find another way to acquire that language. I think that parents or educators can also follow the child's interest and spontaneous activity. Like, are they watching YouTube videos and putting subtitles on? And then do you maybe hear some language that was used in the YouTube video when they speak that could be a sign that they're actually learning from what they see on YouTube or the subtitles that they read. David, do you have any other examples of that? I mean, often, as Alexis has said, is there's a surprise for the parents when they at one point realise that this is not just one or two words, but the child is actually using a lot of different words. And as I said, some children even use a language sometimes that the parents are not understanding. So this is even more a surprise of them because they really want to communicate, to be in touch with their children, using language, because this is something that often typical people use to be in touch in relation with people. And to see that their child actually using language, but not the one that they can understand, I would say, it's a strange experience. It's a strange experience for some parents, but this is the extreme cases. But at one point, also it gives importance to the fact that for some of these children, specifically in the plateau period, some parents or even educators may have the impression that the child is not developing, that the child is not making any progress, the child is not learning things. What that shows is they're actually learning and doing pretty much, I would say, training in something, their interest, their centres of interest is just an example of letters and numbers are often important centre of interest for those children is could be useful for them to get developed and to parents to see that their child actually making progress or making things that is impressive is something that could be reassuring. But at the same time, we need to be careful, as I said before, what is the role of this unexpected bilingualism or the nonsocial way of learning language to what we recommend to teachers and educators. Because I think there's two extremes. At one extreme, there's some that say, don't confuse the child, don't put them exposure to two different kinds of language. They get lost and they will not learn language. This is probably not true. And as we see some of them are able to fully develop a full language using that social acquisition pathway and they will learn a different language. So if we can stimulate that through the progress that have been done, we may stimulate that. But at the same time, we cannot say put your child in front of the television all the time, they will learn language. This is not true either. So there's an in-between where we need to be careful of what we're saying. At one point saying take them off their tablets or books because they will not learn language through that pathway. That would be detrimental for their learning. This is probably not true either. So we have to be in-between be careful, follow the child through this learning. See what kind of progress they make. Try to work with them through this pathway because we don't have a lot of good interventions for language in autism. I mean, most of them, the last meta-analysis that have been done this effect sizes are low. The quality of research is not there to put forward that there's some intervention that actually work for them to help them to learn language. So we have to be careful in what we're saying here because this is early data. I think that's covering pretty much of the question. Is there any advice to parents and teachers how to navigate that balance? What you describe there is really difficult to navigate or to really understand what's the best route or pathway. I would say that in a lot of these families, communicating between children and parents is hard. It's a challenge. It's something that parents express. They don't know how to get in touch with their child, especially the ones that are really minimally speaking. And so I would say that these kinds of discoveries need to be taken as valuable opportunities to find a new way to connect and to consider that maybe there's a different input that these children need to enter in communication. So it might not be please stare at me and look at my eyes and talk to me. It might be I'm going to look at the activity that you're involved with and clearly interested in, and I'm going to maybe try to join in and sit next to you and figure out where you are so I can maybe give you the next step. Just enrich the material that you're clearly interested in to bringing you something extra that maybe you'll catch and want to get involved with. So it's hard. There's no one advice that will work for everyone. But I would say if parents are able to be interested in their child and meet them where they are, to bring them a little bit further, that might be useful to all of them. I want to move us on a little bit to the implications from that research and just thinking about what happens next in terms of practise and research. So what does your study tell us about alternative language acquisition pathways in autism? What does it tell us from that kind of research perspective? That's not necessarily a hard question, but it's a vast question because the implication is not only limited to autism because autism makes us know that something is possible through that way. And it raises the question to more of a global question if we think about is language a communicative tool at first or is language more a cognitive tool at first. So this is a question that we need to address. And those results give some information for those questions. Meaning that language may not be something that is learned to communicate, but more to structure the mind or structure-- and the way it's acquired may not be that close or close as we expect that communication itself. So communication is more the use of language in terms of interactions and the language itself is the material itself or the organ itself. So there's rules, there's grammar, there's phonetic if we speak, but there's all shapes. When we think about the letters, there's some sounds that close often together, some sounds that are often not comes close one together. So there's different levels of how you can understand language. So the unexpected bilingualism research rise up, again, to the front plan the question about is language close to communication or language in itself is something that has its own part, I would say, in the brain or in the development of human being. In autism itself, I think it opens a new field which is how we can pass this dead end, I would say, in interventions, because often interventions for language are trying to give more importance to interactions. So they will try to stimulate be engaged with the child. That could be a good thing to a certain level, but if our expectations are that to help the child to learn language, it may not be. If I go deeper into the theories, I mean, some of them think that language is just delayed if I oversimplified it, or language acquisition may be different. And this kind of information that we have is giving more values to the theory that language acquisition may be different. So if it's different, the intervention that could be, example, useful for other children, so children example with speech and language impairment may not be useful for autistic children. And we may try to stimulate other kind of pathways until the child get one or if it's useful for him. So it might be other kinds of interventions, such as literacy books or lateral tutorship, that could help the child to get into a language not necessarily true interaction. So that really opens this kind of field. But it's not mature now to say that this is the solution, but this is definitely one trajectory we can take. Exactly. So I think this really shifts expectations as in if we just assume that autistic children are following the same path as typically developing kids, but slower or with an altered systems, then you can only try to enforce the same learning mechanisms and then be frustrated when it doesn't work. But if you assume that there's a completely different alternative path that uses different input and redirects the same cognitive systems but learns in a different way, then there might have a lot of implications on our understanding of language acquisition and also interventions such as what David said. I would say we need more data or longitudinal data about what will happen to the child, our example, only using words for letters and numbers in a different language. How much of them will ultimately speak? That's a good question. The estimations are depending on various factors, but there's about 25% of autistic children that will not get fluent level of language. About this, 75% of other autistic, I would say, people at this point because they're often teenagers or adults when we do these kind of measures, they have different levels of language. So there's not a really good predictors of if the child will speak. And that's often something that parents want to know because speaking is a great adaptive tool when you want to make your life is the child will speak later. Now the question is, does an expected bilingualism will make them more prone to speak later, will increase their chance to speak. We don't know. And I think this is a simple question that we need to have some information. It would take some time, at least, because we need to have-- some retrospective data may be done for that also, but this is a question that could be really interesting and important for the field right now also. And are you aware of those studies being planned and organised at the moment, or have you got any other future research that you're planning that you'd want to share? One of my objectives is to call back these people in the study that we're just talking about because the last data was collected in 2021, which means these kids have grown now. And one thing that I'm thinking about planning in the near future is to call back the ones who agree to participate again to ask them how are they doing? How's the language? What language do they speak? And the rest of their development. Maybe even academic development. And then we would be able to maybe test some hypothesis about what UB could predict in terms of language development and general cognitive development. Another thing that we're working on is developing just a more theoretical model of language development in autism based on these findings and others in our research group, to try to elaborate on what this could mean, what this could mean. And then develop new hypotheses that then we'll be able to test with more research. We're also doing work about if I go back to the theories we had, so if language is not a language, I would say faculties or not oriented to language in the beginning of the plateau, might they be oriented to different type of stimuli or information. So we're working on that also to try to find if there might be some hijacking or reorientation or creation of what we can call a chimaera. So a chimaera. So a blend of different faculties using some faculties of language to develop other faculties. So this is another part of the work we're doing right now. Could you give an example of what that would mean kind of to bring that alive for people? Yes. I think one paper that just got out, done by another researcher in our group where I got involved in Alexia also was about calendar calculation. We showed that some of the properties of calendar calculation-- first, people who don't know what it is, is some people, often autistic people, do have a savant ability to know the data about the calendar. I oversimplify that. So if you ask a question, what day of the week was the 5th of September 1993? They will give the answer right away without lagging. And they will give the great answer. And they can do that for years to come. And they could do that for years that I've come out. This faculty is how it is possible. We show that the process that they use to answer those kind of questions might be related to language at some point. So if we track back and we say how this is possible, if we collect that with also the kind of regularities you find in language, regularities found in letters and numbers, the structural aspect of calendar, why they share similarities with language, and I would say, the trajectory of the learning curve of this process also makes us think that it is possible that this is actually one example of the reorientation of language faculty towards a different medium. So the developmental process is occurring, but it's just focused on a different object. Exactly. It's such a fascinating fascinating kind of area. So if people want to find out more about the work you're doing, where would they go? I don't know if there's kind of like a website they could look up. There is. We actually have a new website to our research group. It's called CREIA, C-R-E-I-A. It's a French name, but we have a new website. I have a personal website that I'm going to link to that as well that's just my name dotcom. And we're present on Facebook as well. The CREIA, C-R-E-I-A, we have a Facebook page, where we post new articles and any things that people can look up. David, is there anything else I'm forgetting? There's also the website of Laurent Mottron, where some of our research are posted. And I invite people to go also to my Google Scholar, or the same one for Alexia, where you can find our latest research also that have been published. So there's the website of Laurent Mottron's laboratory that we both-- David is doing his PhD there and I did my PhD there. And the URL is lnc-autisme in French. So autisme with an E at the end, umontreal.ca. So lnn-autisme.umontreal.ca. My name alexiaostrolenk.com, so alexiaostrolenk.com. And I'll make sure to update it so that all the new links are also linked on my website so people can find it. It's all good. Cool. Finally, are there any key takeaway messages you'd like to share with our listeners? I think what I would say is just I would tell people to be open to alternative ways in which children can develop because if we keep expecting children to reach typical milestones in a typical order, we might miss abilities that we're not focusing on and then just be frustrated that they're not following this typical developmental pathway. But there might be another path and it's important that we focus on it and that we feed it if we want children to develop in their own way. One thing I can add is that the language plateau the developmental plateau, where is the symptoms or the signs of autism are usually at their highest point, can be really disarming for parents or even sometimes therapists at this point is not devoid of actual progress. And actually, I would say to one point, language development or language like development and the learning in autistic children is atypical, not necessarily delayed for some of them. Thank you so much for the conversation today. It's been really informative and yeah, really looking forward to it being released. Same. It was very great talking to you. Thank you very much for your time. I'm sure you agree that was a fascinating discussion about a topic that, to be honest, I never knew existed. So do please leave comments, reviews, and suggestions and share with colleagues. It really does help us boost the profile of the podcast. Also, get yourself a free ACAMH Learn account from acamhlearn.org and you'll be able to get a free CPD/CME certificate for listening to any of the podcasts. Next week we'll be visiting the renowned Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, as I speak to Dr. Beate St Pourcain and Dr. Ellen Verhoef about the genetic links between early physical movements in babies and how these connect to the start of language skills like babbling or first words. [MUSIC PLAYING]