People with autism often struggle with reading. Recent studies indicate that as many as 73 percent of individuals with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty reading. Their challenges are usually substantially different from those faced by students with dyslexia.
“People with dyslexia have trouble with decoding and phonemic awareness,” says Lawrence Kloth, co-founder of Reading Success Plus. “With autism, it doesn’t work that way.”
Most autistic students do well with decoding and sounding out words, knowing the alphabet, sound-symbol correspondence, and similar skills that youngsters with dyslexia struggle to acquire.
Their weakness is reading comprehension, despite their ability to read the words accurately and quickly. Words are easy to understand, but the ideas that the words represent are difficult to grasp.
“Part of why people like to read so much is that they like to use the words to make a movie in their heads,” Lawrence says. “People with autism can’t do that. They might read a passage flawlessly three or four times and still not understand it. They really have trouble making inferences from the story, and a lot of abstract thinking is really, really tough for them.”
Root causes
A post on the Reading Rockets website presents an overview of why students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have trouble understanding what they read. It identifies three cognitive deficits that contribute to comprehension difficulties.
Theory of mind is the ability to understand another’s point of view or perspective. In reading, that would be the ability to understand and relate to characters’ feelings. “Without theory of mind, students with ASD struggle with understanding the idea that people have thoughts other than their own, understanding situations from others’ perspectives, and predicting behavior based upon context.”
Executive functioning is “the process of organizing, planning, and monitoring progress when presented with a situation.” Such deficits in students with ASD might impair their ability to sequence the events of a story, access prior knowledge and make connections, create mental images, engage in discussions, and summarize.
Central coherence is “the ability to bring details together into a whole concept or idea.” Autistic students with weak central coherence may be unable to identify a text’s theme by pulling together details together.
These deficits are distinct from those seen in students with dyslexia — lack of phonemic awareness, weak short-term memory, and decoding difficulties.
“Compare how people with autism and people with dyslexia interpret what a story means,” Lawrence says. “The autistic reader can cruise through the test, read every word correctly, and not understand what it means. It’s like, ‘OK, I read the words, move on.’ They recognize what the word says, but don’t know what it means. People with dyslexia have a problem decoding the words, but once they get through that, they understand the bigger meaning.
“People with autism tend to see the world in black and white. Decoding is black and white, and they usually excel at that,” Lawrence says. “Reading comprehension is more of the gray area — interpretation, context, making connections. Most dyslexics are very good at that, and most people with autism are not.”
Deceptively fluent
An autistic child’s reading difficulties aren’t always apparent because their ability to decode may obscure their lack of comprehension.
According to Indiana University’s Research Center for Autism, “Some children with ASD become good at memorizing sight words but don’t attach meaning to the words. When these children read, they sound like they have a large sight vocabulary. People can overestimate the child’s ability to read with meaning when they look only at their oral reading ability. Most people would automatically assume that if a word is in one’s sight-reading dictionary, that it is used with meaning.”
At the extreme, some autistic children between the ages of roughly 2 and 5 develop hyperlexia, where they self-teach themselves to recognize a large number of words without knowing their meaning. While some of these children may eventually develop comprehension skills, what appears to be prodigy-like reading ability is only masking a disability.
If you don’t understand that aspect of autism, seeing such a child struggle with comprehension can be baffling.
“You’re like, ‘Why is that child having such a hard time?’” Lawrence says. “’They know every word. Why do they not get it?’ It’s not because they aren’t smart or aren’t trying. That’s just what autism is.”
Creating mental pictures
Addressing reading difficulties related to autism requires different strategies than those used with dyslexia. Lawrence says one key is helping the reader form mental images to associate with a word. Students with ASD engage with and make meaning from the text through visual support.
“For example, if I say ‘pig,’ they can read it, but they don’t understand what that word means. So, we show them the word, then show a picture of a pig to help make the connection, because they’re extremely visual and have to see something to understand it.”
Graphic organizers are another tool that can help autistic readers make connections between words and their meaning, using lines and shapes to illustrate how words and ideas fit together.
Reading Success Plus supports autistic readers through Visualizing and Verbalizing, an evidence-based program developed by Lindemood-Bell. According to its website, Visualizing and Verbalizing “develops concept imagery—the ability to create an imagined or imaged gestalt from language—as a basis for comprehension and higher order thinking. The development of concept imagery improves reading and listening comprehension, memory, oral vocabulary, critical thinking, and writing.”
This is a link to a video that provides a helpful overview of Visualizing and Verbalizing. Note that this is not a program specifically designed for autistic students; it can help any reader struggling to “make a movie in their head.” But its concepts are well-suited to the autistic reader working to improve comprehension.
What if it’s more than autism?
Reading Success Plus understands the importance of providing instruction that best fits the student’s needs. Our primary program is the Barton Reading & Spelling System. This evidence-based Orton-Gillingham program emphasizes the development of phonemic awareness and decoding skills. It is highly effective for those with dyslexia, who make up the majority of our students. Visualizing and Verbalizing, with its emphasis on creating mental pictures, is the best choice for someone with autism who already has decoding skills but struggles with comprehension.
But not everybody with reading difficulty falls neatly into those categories.
“Dyslexia can go with autism,” Lawrence says. “So can ADHD. We have had students with autism, dyslexia, and ADHD all at once. I have a student who is dyslexic and on the spectrum. They need Barton for the decoding and Visualizing and Verbalizing for the comprehension. Tutoring could take longer because they are working on two different things, but we can help them with both.”
Because a reading problem may be rooted in dyslexia, autism, or both, it is important to start with appropriate screening and evaluation.
“That’s why we try to collaborate with families, and why we use testing, previous testing and evaluation, and other things when we go through our process,” Lawrence says. “We want to take everything into consideration before we suggest what program or programs a student will need.”
To learn more
Here are some useful web pages where you can explore this topic in greater depth.
Reading Comprehension and Autism in the Primary General Education Classroom | Reading Rockets
High-Functioning Autism and Reading Challenges: NeuroLaunch
Reading Success Plus has offices in Grand Rapids and Troy and offers one-on-one tutoring online or in person in reading, math and writing. You can get more information at readingsuccessplus.com. To contact us, call 833-229-1112 or go online to https://readingsuccessplus.com/#contact.