Analysis of phonological development and reading acquistion in children with autism spectrum disorder : where does comprehension get lost?

Abstract

Reading comprehension in children is often limited by weak decoding skill. Decoding is the transfer or translation of letters into units of meaning, i.e. the understanding of letter strings into words. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have shown a different pattern in that they have poor reading comprehension but good decoding skill. The aim of this study was to examine some of the possible sources of reading comprehension problems in children with ASD. The target population was children with a diagnosis of ASD who were between the ages of 4 and 9 and who lived in the St. John's, NL area. Ten participants completed tests assessing spelling, vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, phonological awareness, word decoding as well as word, passage, and listening comprehension. Word decoding was assessed to confirm previous research and as a comparison tool. The children's decoding ability was similar to population means, t(9) = .44, p =.67, but within the groups sentence comprehension and listening comprehension were found to be poorer than word comprehension, t(9) = 4.08, p < .01; t(9) = 3.08, p = .01, respectively. This pattern of findings suggested that problems in reading comprehension that have been observed in children with ASD were likely due to factors other than decoding and could be due to more general difficulties with language processing.