Strategies of readers with autism when responding to inferential questions: An eye-movement study

Abstract

Previous research suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulties with inference gen-eration in reading tasks. However, most previous studies have examined how well children understand a text afterreading or have measured on-line reading behavior without response to questions. The aim of this study was to inves-tigate the online strategies of children and adolescents with autism during reading and at the same time respondingto a question by monitoring their eye movements. The reading behavior of participants with ASD was compared withthat of age-, language-, nonverbal intelligence-, reading-, and receptive language skills-matched participants withoutASD (control group). The results showed that the ASD group were as accurate as the control group in generating infer-ences when answering questions about the short texts, and no differences were found between the two groups in theglobal paragraph reading and responding times. However, the ASD group displayed longer gaze latencies on a targetword necessary to produce an inference. They also showed more regressions into the word that supported the infer-ence compared to the control group after reading the question, irrespective of whether an inference was required ornot. In conclusion, the ASD group achieved an equivalent level of inferential comprehension, but showed subtle dif-ferences in reading comprehension strategies compared to the control group.