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Web End = J Autism Dev Disord (2016) 46:10251037 DOI 10.1007/s10803-015-2648-6
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Web End = Readers with Autism Can Produce Inferences, but they Cannot Answer Inferential Questions
Maria J. Tirado1 David Saldaa1
Published online: 7 November 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Readers with autism (ASD), poor comprehension (PC), and typical development (TD) took part in three reading experiments requiring the production of inferences. In Experiments 1 and 2 reading times for target phrases placed immediately after text implicitly indicating the emotion of a protagonist or after a number of ller sentences, respectivelywere used as measures of inferencing. In Experiment 3, participants were explicitly asked to identify the protagonists emotion. There were no signi-cant differences among groups in Experiment 1. Compared to TD readers, the PC group performed poorly in Experiments 2 and 3. ASD readers performed worse than PC participants only in the explicit-question task. Although ASD readers can produce inferences, they respond to questions about them with difculty.
Keywords Autism Inferences Poor comprehension
Reading comprehension
Introduction
Readers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tend to show a discrepancy between comparatively good word reading and poor reading comprehension (e.g., Castles et al. 2010; Flores and Ganz 2009; Huemer and Mann 2010; Jones et al. 2009; St Clair et al. 2010). Although they are not all good word readers with respect to age-appropriate levels,
their accuracy scores in word reading tasks are in many cases superior to their ability to respond in reading comprehension tests, showing what has been called a hyper-lexic or poor comprehender prole (Brown et al. 2013; Nation 2005).
The inability to adequately process inferences is one of the decits that has been most related to poor comprehension in autism. The original studies by Frith and Snowling (1983) and Happ (1997) showed that people with autism have difculties inferring the adequate meaning of a homograph, because of their problems in placing themselves in the context of a story (but see Brock and Bzishvili 2013, for critical analysis of this task).
Later, Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen (1999a, b)...