Ming, a speech therapist with nine years of experience, observes that autistic children with speech delays often prefer English even in multilingual homes like Hong Kong, where Cantonese or Mandarin would be more practical. He explains why this happens and why it matters.
So throughout my career teaching children, I think it's been nine years now, most children who are on the spectrum are somewhat delayed. They prefer to speak English, which is good for me because I speak English. But at the same time we're dealing with a world that is becoming more multicultural and multilingual. But at the same time where English is becoming like a common language for everyone, children still need to speak their mother tongue in certain countries, in certain cities, right? We have children who are in Hong Kong where I'm from, where Cantonese or Chinese or even Mandarin nowadays is quite important. Sometimes children just skip that and decide to speak English only, which is to be fair, quite depressing. And also it's not that functional because like most children nowadays, they speak like two languages. If you're not in the United States, all right, that's a whole different thing. But why do they prefer English? The reason is very simple.
