In this 'webinar', Courtenay Norbury from The University of London, Royal Holloway will present on the issues related to reading in people with autism spectrum disorders.
There is very little research on the literacy skills of children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), yet every reason to believe that reading might present a special challenge for them. In this talk I will review evidence for differences in cognitive style that may impact on successful comprehension of text for children with ASD. I will describe in detail recent work in which we compared the reading profiles of children with ASD and additional language impairments to (a) children with ASD and normal range language skills, (b) non-autistic children with language impairments and (c) typical peers. Within ASD, the relationship between language ability and decoding was not straightforward, whereas non-autistic children with language impairment universally impaired in decoding. Across groups, language strongly predicted comprehension success; however even the most able children with ASD were less able than typical peers to infer information not explicitly mentioned from connected text. In conclusion, an increasing number of children with ASD and/or language impairments are being educated in mainstream classrooms. Although their social difficulties may be most noticeable, we should be vigilant in monitoring their literacy development as this is likely to impact greatly on their educational attainment and employment prospects.