Understanding Chinese high-functioning autistic children : the simple “mind” of reading

Abstract

Children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) were reported to be highly associated with hyperlexia with precocious decoding abilities but poor reading comprehension in alphabetic languages (e.g., Nation, Clarke, Wright, & Williams, 2006; Newman et al., 2007). However, this profile has never been explored in Chinese, a logographic script. Furthermore, the contributing factors to this decoding-comprehension discrepancy remained unclear. This study explored the hyperlexia profile in Chinese school-aged children with HFASD and further examined whether the autism-exclusive deficit: theory of mind (ToM) could explain their narrative reading comprehension performance. Tasks measuring nonverbal ability, working memory, vocabulary breadth and depth, ToM skills, Chinese word reading accuracy and fluency, and narrative reading comprehension were administered to 42 Chinese school-aged children with HFASD and 55 normal controls at ages 7 to 9. Results indicated that the HFASD group exhibited hyperlexia profile and they experienced particular difficulties in advanced ToM skills. Furthermore, ToM skills were unique predictors of narrative reading comprehension in the HFASD group after controlling nonverbal intelligence, word reading and vocabulary knowledge. These findings supported the universal nature of hyperlexia across languages in HFASD and suggested a new reading framework for school-aged children with HFASD by underscoring the importance of ToM skills in narrative reading comprehension.