More and Less Social Comprehension: Child and Text Factors for Autistic Children - PROJECT SUMMARY/ ABSTRACT
Listening comprehension is an important predictor of later reading comprehension, academic success,
health, psychosocial, and vocational outcomes; yet roughly 65% of autistic school-age children have poor
comprehension. Non-autistic comprehension of more social (e.g., narrative) texts is better than less social (e.g.,
expository texts) because non-autistics can bootstrap their real-world social understanding to better
understand the text. In contrast, autistic comprehension of less social texts has been shown in a small pilot
study to be better than more social texts, which is likely due to their social communication impairments. The
Construction-Integration Theory of Comprehension stipulates that a situation model (i.e., a mental
representation) is constructed through interactions between child factors (i.e., individual differences in a
child’s abilities) and text factors (i.e., individual differences across texts). Both linguistic child factors (e.g.,
vocabulary and morphosyntax) and social child factors (e.g., social communication and theory of mind) predict
reading comprehension in autistic children. However, these factors have not been examined for listening
comprehension in autistic children and have only been examined for more social texts. Text factors (e.g., word
concreteness and narrativity) impact comprehension in non-autistic individuals but have all but been ignored
for autistic individuals. The overall objective of this project is to investigate how child factors (linguistic and
social) and text factors (linguistic and social) impact comprehension in autistic children (9- to 12-years). We
will (1) Examine how listening comprehension of more and less social texts differs for autistic children; (2)
Identify child predictors (linguistic and social) of listening comprehension for more and less social texts; and
(3) Identify text predictors (linguistic and social) of listening comprehension for more and less social texts. The
central hypothesis is that both child and text factors impact comprehension and that social and linguistic child
and text factors differentially contribute, depending on the content of the text. That is, the linguistic factors will
predict comprehension across text type whereas the social factors will specifically predict comprehension of
more social texts. The proposed project lays the methodological and empirical groundwork for using a
precision medicine approach to identify and manipulate child and text factors for novel, effective
comprehension interventions for autistic individuals.
