a question about multilingual babies

[Natalia Rakhlin]

Dear Parisa,

The alleged link between vaccines and autism has been thoroughly investigated by high-quality peer-reviewed studies on thousands of children in a number of different countries, which found no evidence of any such link. A good review of these studies (with citations) is in a recent article in Current Opinion in Pediatrics (Landrigan, P. J. (2010). What causes autism? Exploring the environmental contribution; Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 22(2), pp. 219-225). Although we do not know yet what causes autism (genetic factors, yes - but these alone are not sufficient to explain it in totality), we do know pretty definitively that vaccines or parenting style do not cause autism.  Lancet famously retracted the 12-year-old article that claimed to have found a vaccination-autism link because the data in it were fabricated. The article I mentioned reviews the genetics studies of autism and probes other potential environmental causes, which all involve very early (prenatal) exposure to neurotoxins, such as lead, methylmercury, DDT, etc., whose effects on humans have not been studied well enough, but which plausibly may cause injury to developing brain.  Like others who responded to this query, I am not aware of any study that suggested that early exposure to multiple languages is linked to autism. 

Sincerely,
Natalia

 

Natalia Rakhlin
Child Study Center
Yale University
230 South Frontage Road
New Haven, CT 06519-1124



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