Who do you refer to? How young students with mild intellectual disability confront anaphoric ambiguities in texts and sentences.
Students with mild ID miss gender cues that fix pronoun mix-ups, but a simple "Who is he?" prompt boosts accuracy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Gema and colleagues watched kids with mild intellectual disability read short texts.
They used eye-tracking to see how the kids handled pronouns like "he" or "she."
The team also mixed in gender mismatches ("Mary... he") to check if readers noticed.
What they found
Students with ID moved their eyes more and took longer to pick the right person for each pronoun.
When the gender was wrong, they rarely looked back or said anything; typical kids did.
In short, the students did not use the gender cue to spot or fix the error.
How this fits with other research
DeRoma et al. (2004) flipped the problem into a fix. They taught high-functioning students with autism to ask "Who is he?" while reading. Comprehension jumped, showing the skill can be trained.
Espín-Tello et al. (2017) saw a similar slow-down in autism: kids answered inferential questions correctly but needed extra eye jumps and time. The pattern looks like a shared processing delay, not a pure deficit.
Dissanayake et al. (2010) proved eye-tracking works for Down syndrome readers too. Their "wrap-up" delays match Gema’s anaphor delays, hinting that slower integration is common across ID groups.
Why it matters
If a reader ignores gender cues, the text can unravel. Add a quick prompt — "Who is she?" — and you give the student a concrete hook. Try it next session: point to the pronoun, ask for the name, and wait. Eye-tracking studies say give them that extra second; your prompt supplies the strategy.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Along 2 experiments we tested the anaphoric pronoun resolution abilities of readers with intellectual disability in comparison with chronological and reading age-matched groups. In Experiment 1, the anaphor test of Elosúa, Carriedo, and García-Madruga (2009) confirmed that readers with intellectual disability (ID) are slower than control readers resolving clitic anaphoric pronouns, especially when the use of morphological cues (e.g. gender) is necessary. In order to test if the poor performance could be due to low levels of metacognitive skills during reading, an inconsistency detection task combined with eye tracking was designed in Experiment 2. Participants read short texts with an anaphoric pronoun in the fifth sentence, either morphologically (gender) consistent or not with the information provided in the second sentence. The scores in the anaphor comprehension questions presented after the text confirmed that readers with ID are affected by the gender inconsistency but they are unable to explicitly report it and recover from it, as the number of re-fixations after reading the critical sentence suggests. As their answers to the explicit detection questions showed, the adults control group did not show any preference for morphosyntax or semantics in spite of being aware of the inconsistency. In sum, both groups of readers with and without ID are affected by inconsistencies, but ID readers do not have appropriate metacognitive skills to explicitly identify the source of the inconsistency and fix it.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.12.014