Reading comprehension of ambiguous sentences by school-age children with autism spectrum disorder.
Meghan M Davidson, Susan Ellis Weismer
PMID 28834327WHAT IT FOUND
School-age children with autism spectrum disorder understood ambiguous sentences less accurately than peers, but both groups used context to access meanings.
Difficulty appeared when selecting meanings afterward. Word recognition, word meaning knowledge, and age were associated with performance.
Key findings
01Children with autism spectrum disorder had lower accuracy on ambiguous sentence comprehension than typically developing controls.
02Both groups showed the same condition pattern: biased sentences were harder than neutral sentences, but biased-dominant and biased-subordinate sentences did not differ.
03Sentence comprehension was better for older children, children with better word recognition, and children with better word meaning knowledge, and eye movements showed context competition in both groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
46 children were analysed, including 23 with autism spectrum disorder and 23 controls, so the findings may not generalise widely. The groups differed in word decoding, word recognition, and passage comprehension before the experimental task, so lower written sentence comprehension in the autism group may be linked to these reading skills. The eye-tracking analysis excluded trials without fixations on both context and target, and four participants were removed after data collection for technical issues or extreme scores. The look-back interaction for the autism group in the biased-dominant condition was described as unstable and should be interpreted cautiously. The sentences were simple, so the findings may not apply to longer or more complex reading tasks. The study did not directly compare listening and written tasks, so it cannot determine whether modality alone explains differences in context integration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with autism spectrum disorder cannot use context while reading. Their overall sentence accuracy was lower, but both groups showed the same condition pattern and eye movements showed context competition.