Autism and Spontaneous L2 Language Acquisition

Fascinating paper I glanced over this morning that looked at Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and the acquisition of foreign language "non-interactively", i.e. not in a school setting or with any intent from parents or caretakers to teach kids.

Some really cool case studies mentioned (all subjects had ASD):

• 10yo Bulgarian girl acquires "superior" German proficiency across oral, vocab, and grammar via watching TV shows
• 5 Tunisian boys acquired Modern Standard Arabic
• 11yo Russian boy acquired English from passively watching cartoons, even producing English as his first words
• 3 children who acquired English purely from watching YouTube
• 6yo Moroccan boy acquired English from passive consumption of media and exhibited delayed development of Moroccan Arabic

There's still so much to be learned about L2 acquisition!