Central Coherence in relation to Reading in Hong Kong Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Background When interacting with text, ASD children with different deficits in cognitive processing show different comprehension profiles. Previous research mainly focuses on reading texts in English, an alphabetical writing system, while few studies address how ASD children tackle reading in Chinese, a logographic writing system. Objectives This study investigates whether there are any differences in linguistic strategies in Hong Kong bilingual ASD children in comprehending text in English and Chinese. We also explore whether the ASD bilinguals make use of linguistic context to derive context-dependent meaning, and whether lexical ambiguity in Chinese affects the linguistic judgment of ASD bilinguals when they read. Apart from sentence context and syntactic context, we explore how visual stimulation affects the lexical word choices of ASD children, and how this differs from typical children of the same age. Methods Two subject populations participated in the study, a group of 17 Hong Kong ASD bilinguals and a group of 24 Hong Kong bilinguals with typical language development. All participants are studying at local primary schools from primary 3-6 and have intelligence within the normal range. All the subjects took part in a Homograph Task, Semantic Processing Task, Homophone Task, Lexical Ambiguity Task, Sentence Re-Arrangement Task and Picture and Semantic Task. Conclusion Based on preliminary results, the ASD bilinguals tend to provide the more common interpretation of the homographs, disregarding the context. They performed better when recalling words from the semantically related lists and are able to use the contextual information provided in the sentence together with knowledge of different meanings of the homophones. The results suggest that the lexical ambiguity of Chinese does not much affect the ASD children’s ability to construct a coherent representation of a sentence. However, they perform relatively poorly in arranging the words into a meaningful sentence in both languages.