Pre-school Skills and School-Age Reading Comprehension in Children on the Autism Spectrum: A Preliminary Investigation.
Jessica Paynter, Kate O'Leary, Marleen Westerveld
PMID 36932272WHAT IT FOUND
In children on the autism spectrum, pre-school receptive vocabulary significantly predicted reading comprehension in the third year of schooling.
By year three, most children had reading accuracy within the average range, but only 36.8% showed reading comprehension within the average range, indicating a persistent gap between decoding and understanding text.
Key findings
01Pre-school receptive vocabulary showed a large, significant correlation with reading comprehension in the third year of schooling (r = 0.76, p = 0.001).
02At the third year of schooling, participants performed significantly lower on reading comprehension (M = 83.64) than on reading accuracy (M = 99.50), with a large effect size (d = 1.18).
03Among the 11 children with valid scores at both time points, 45.5% moved from below to within the average reading comprehension range, while none dropped out of the average range.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was preliminary with a small sample size (n=19 at YOS3), which limited statistical power to detect smaller effects. Attrition was significant, with only 19 of the original 57 children completing the third-year assessment, largely due to geographical distance and inability to contact families. The reading measure used (YARC) requires adequate reading accuracy to yield a comprehension score, meaning children with poor decoding skills did not receive comprehension scores, potentially masking the full extent of comprehension difficulties in the group. The study did not control for or account for specific interventions or educational supports the children may have received during the school years.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism and Griffith University. The YOS3 component did not receive specific funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the improvement in the proportion of children with average-range comprehension from YOS1 to YOS3 as evidence that the gap between accuracy and comprehension is closing naturally. The absolute difference in mean scores between accuracy and comprehension actually increased (from 14.05 points to 15.86 points), and the majority of children (63.2%) still performed below age expectations in comprehension at YOS3.