There is extensive research on bilingualism in NT children from multiple perspectives — linguistic, cognitive, biological, social, educational, and more — with consistent evidence of a range of benefits for development and no adverse consequences of learning and use more than one language. Although there is a much smaller literature on bilingualism in individuals with NDDs, the emerging data also suggest benefits rather than adverse consequences. More studies on this topic in NDD populations, however, are needed to provide timely, appropriate, and effective support and intervention to help those with NDDs become bilingual, especially in multicultural and multilingual countries such as the U.S. in which bilingualism should be a right for these families and not a privilege.

This survey is a necessary contribution, as for the first time, the perception of native Spanish speaking parents of children with and without NDDs residing in the U.S. regarding their child’s bilingualism as well as their perception of the community and professional support they receive for bilingualism is explored. Understanding families’ perspectives is essential to building policies to provide them the support needed for their children to develop their skills in their home language/s as well as in English. To this end, we surveyed Spanish-speaking parents of 4- to 24-year-olds with and without NDDs who were born and residing in the U.S. with objective being to characterize and compare the use of English and Spanish in Hispanic families, as well as learn parental perceptions of their children’s bilingualism and professional and community support.

Before discussing the findings, it is important to acknowledge the group-related differences in several demographic factors. For example, more parents from the NDD group were born outside of the U.S. and considered themselves not to be fluent English speakers, compared to the parents in the NT group. Such differences could have impacted the pattern of results for the language preferences and community characteristics. At the same time, however, both groups of parents maintained Spanish as their primary language, and this factor would reasonably be expected to be a driver of parental preferences regarding their children’s bilingualism. Nonetheless, our findings should be seen as preliminary and as suggesting hypotheses for future research with larger, matched participant samples.

Our first research objective was to characterize and compare Spanish and English language usage of U.S.-residing Hispanic families who have children, adolescents, and young adults with and without NDDs. In this regard, our results show that virtually all NT and NDD children, adolescents, and young adults can understand both English and Spanish but fewer NDD people use Spanish in their speech, compared to NT. In addition, it is reported that both NT and NDDs tend to prefer English over Spanish or no preference at all.

Importantly, most of the families who raised their children as bilinguals reported that both parents and children use English and Spanish words in the same sentence, with no significant differences between groups in this regard. Given the language flexibility reported by parents, we suggest that language assessments, whether for clinical purposes or research, should carefully consider family preferences and practices when deciding on the language/s of assessment, as well as when interpreting the results of assessments. That is, counting language production in both languages when evaluating the language skills of a child regardless of the language in which the assessment has been administered. More generally, it will be increasingly necessary to take a more dynamic approach to language assessments using language practices of bilingual families as the norm in terms of both administration and interpretation. This is in line with the concept of “translanguaging” (Otheguy et al., 2015), described as the process whereby multilingual speakers use their languages as an integrated communication system. In fact, there is evidence that the use of expressive language sampling procedures involving parent–child interaction elicit numerous language shifts in talk by Spanish–English bilingual parents and their children with autism (del Hoyo Soriano et al., 2021a, b).

Adopting a more dynamic approach when evaluating bilingual children would entail, among other things, allowing the child to shift between languages when speaking and to interact with a bilingual examiner who can also match the child’s within-sample language shifts so that the child feels comfortable and fully supported, and of course consider language production of both languages when interpreting the assessment results. This is especially important as a correct interpretation of results from such assessment may have a direct impact in professional recommendations regarding bilingual practices.

Finally, most of the families in the present study indicated that their children were exposed to both English and Spanish both in and outside the home. This is interesting as previous research suggests that it is of critical importance to ensure a high amount of exposure to a language for language growth to take place (Kay-Raining Bird et al., 2016). Therefore, our results together indicate that efforts should be made to facilitate the exposure of the weaker language through services available to these children as early as possible and to educate health care and education professionals by creating evidence-based guidelines for the best practices to support early bilingualism in NDD populations.

It is important to note, however, that although both groups are exposed to Spanish inside and outside the house, we still see that NT children are more likely to speak Spanish (or master it) and to be raised as bilinguals, compared to NDDs. Therefore, even though we see similar patterns of language exposure in families with and without NDDs, it seems like NDD children are less likely to speak Spanish, probably given a lack of resources specific for these populations. Indeed, the reason cited by all parents who decided to raise their children as monolingual was a lack of access to services, suggesting that NDD families might have chosen to raise their children as bilingual if they had the resources available to them to do it. These results are in line with the second research objective concerning parental perceptions on their children’s bilingualism.

Furthermore, we only see that those with NDDs (but not NT) have ever thought there are reasons for their child not to become bilingual as they thought they would not be capable for a variety of reasons (e.g., diagnosis and language difficulties). One explanation behind such thoughts could be the sociodemographic difference between parents regarding their English language skills; however, a contributing factor might also be the lack of resources available in the community to support bilingualism in children with atypical development, as well as less encouraging professionals. Having this information in mind could help in the understanding of the societal changes needed to help bilingual Hispanic families of children with NDDs maintain their linguistic heritage and accrue the benefits of bilingualism.

Concerning parental perceptions of professional and community support, our results are in line with previous studies of autism in showing that parents of children with NDD were often told by professionals to speak only the majority language to their children or they chose to do so themselves because they feared that exposure to two languages would cause or exacerbate developmental challenges or because they simply could not access services in their native language (Ijalba, 2016; Jegatheesan, 2011; Kay-Raining Bird et al., 2012; Yu, 2013). Importantly, in these studies parents expressed personal loss and sadness if they chose to speak only English to their autistic children.

A number of parents also expressed discomfort and difficulty when speaking a non-native language with their child (Yu, 2013) or said they talked less frequently to their child when they used the majority language because it felt less natural. Our results are in line with previous studies as suggested that even if Spanish is the primary language of the parents, some families still choose to use only English to communicate with their children with the goal of not hampering their language development, with this being more common in families of NDD children. However, the vast majority of parents, regardless of whether their children are NT or NDD, value bilingualism, and most of the parents who decided to raise their children as monolinguals indicated that regret with that decision, which is in line with previous research (e.g., Yu, 2013).

Although the current study makes a necessary contribution by detailing the experiences of Hispanic families of children, adolescents, and young adults with and without NDDs residing in the U.S., some limitations must be acknowledged. First, despite the desirability to recruit a sample with similar sociodemographic characteristics in both NT and NDD groups, we can observe important differences between groups such as the country of birth of the parent. Mean age and sex frequencies of the parents and the children are also diverse between groups, all of which should be considered as possible confounders when interpreting our findings.

Second, it is important to recognize that our sample size is relatively small for a survey-based study, and we are dealing with several missing data in some of the questions.

Third, we did not include a question for those families who decided to raise their children as bilinguals, which was asking whether it was a simultaneous (from birth or soon after) or sequential exposure/learning (usually after the 3 years of age). Such questions would have provided information on whether bilingual families from each group choose one over the other pattern of exposure, as well as for those sequential bilinguals, whether the first language introduced was English or Spanish. This is an important topic given that Spanish was the primary language for all the parents in the present study and all of them reported that their children were exposed to Spanish at home (directly or indirectly). Thus, it could be that some of our bilingual families might have naturally first introduced Spanish to their child, then introduced English with school or the other way around.

In addition, we did not collect information regarding birth order from those parents with more than one child (e.g., first-born children vs their later-born siblings); this is a limitation as the position a child occupies among their siblings may be relevant (e.g., language experience of a child with older siblings, compared to younger).

Finally, we must acknowledge limitations associated with online survey-based studies, such as respondent self-selection (i.e., the decision to participate in the survey is left entirely up to individuals which gives rise to research bias in terms of motivation/demographics) and accessibility issues (i.e., access to a computer, tablet or phone) and internet).

Future studies with larger data sets, including families for whom primary language is other than Spanish, and including questions such as siblings birth order, pattern, and timing of language exposure should be conducted to extend current results. In addition, non-survey-based studies on the topic need to be performed to support our data.