Autism
Where do autistic teens struggle with reading and writing?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Autistic teenagers read words and answered text questions as well as their peers, but they did worse when reading required switching strategies and when writing stories, and these weaknesses tracked their school grades.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Case-control — Cross-sectional comparison of an autistic group and a typically developing group, with MANCOVAs controlling for IQ, vocabulary and parental education, plus within-group correlations and regressions predicting school grades.
- N
- N=56 · 56 adolescents aged 12-14: 30 autistic without intellectual disability (28 boys) and 26 typically developing (17 boys).
- Population
- Adolescents in the Valencia region of Spain around the transition to secondary school; autistic group had a prior clinical diagnosis confirmed with the ADI-R and SCQ, IQ above 80
- Outcome
- Word reading accuracy and speed, literal and inferential comprehension, a 'mental flexibility' reading-strategy subtest, narrative writing (length, syntactic diversity, coherence), parent-reported grades and transition success
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Key findings
The groups did not differ in word-reading accuracy, reading speed, or literal and inferential comprehension. The autistic group scored lower on the flexibility-dependent reading subtest, a large effect with partial eta squared of 0.22, and wrote shorter stories with less varied sentence structure that more often left the story's resolution out. Autistic students also had lower grades and a less successful transition by parent report. Within the autistic group, the flexibility reading score alone explained 31% of the variance in language grades and 24% in maths grades.
Methodology
The researchers tested 56 Spanish adolescents aged 12 to 14, 30 autistic without intellectual disability and 26 typically developing, one-to-one at their schools. They measured reading of a 40-word list, literal and inferential questions about two expository texts, a subtest asking students to adapt and explain their reading strategies, and a story written about a birthday picture that was scored blind for length, variety of complex sentences and coherence. Parents reported recent grades and how well the move to secondary school had gone, and group differences were tested while controlling for IQ, vocabulary and parents' education.
Limitations
With 30 autistic participants, almost all boys, and a single cross-sectional snapshot, the study cannot show that reading or writing weaknesses cause lower grades; the grade links are correlations. The comprehension texts were short expository passages with little social content, which the authors suggest may explain why the usual comprehension gap did not appear, so the null result should not be generalised to narrative or social texts. Several tests had only moderate reliability, writing was sampled from one narrative prompt, and grades and transition success came from parents rather than school records. Some F values reported for grades are identical to those reported for writing, so the exact grade statistics in the text should be treated with caution.
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