Processing of co-reference in autism spectrum disorder.
ASD readers link pronouns to their nouns just as fast as peers; extra look-backs do not slow the first step.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bassett-Gunter et al. (2017) watched the eyes of 24 ASD adults and 24 typical adults while they read short stories.
Each story contained pronouns like "he" that pointed back to an earlier name. The team timed how fast readers linked the pronoun to the right person.
No extra teaching was given; the task simply measured automatic understanding.
What they found
Both groups solved the pronoun link in the same split-second.
The only difference: ASD readers looked back at the earlier name more often before moving on.
Speed was equal; re-checking was higher.
How this fits with other research
Baixauli et al. (2016) pooled 24 studies and found that autistic children tell weaker stories overall. Bassett-Gunter et al. (2017) narrows the problem: the hook-up of pronouns works fine; the trouble may sit in later story-building steps.
Hastings et al. (2001) and Happé et al. (2006) claimed weak central coherence — missing the big picture — is common in ASD. The new eye data do not overturn these papers; they simply show that one building block of coherence, pronoun resolution, runs on time.
Sasson et al. (2018) showed ASD kids use fewer feeling words when describing pictures. Together the two studies sketch a split: quick pronoun understanding versus slower emotional or global language production.
Why it matters
Stop assuming that slow reading scores in ASD come from basic pronoun confusion. The delay lives elsewhere — maybe vocabulary, maybe world knowledge. Target those layers in your language programs and leave pronoun drills alone unless data show a different need.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Check if your client’s comprehension errors happen after pronouns; if not, shift practice time to vocabulary or main-idea questions.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: Accuracy for reading comprehension and inferencing tasks has previously been reported as reduced for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), relative to typically developing (TD) controls. In this study, we used an eye movements and reading paradigm to examine whether this difference in performance accuracy is underpinned by differences in the inferential work required to compute a co-referential link. Participants read two sentences that contained a category noun (e.g., bird) that was preceded by and co-referred to an exemplar that was either typical (e.g., pigeon) or atypical (e.g., penguin). Both TD and ASD participants showed an effect of typicality for gaze durations upon the category noun, with longer times being observed when the exemplar was atypical, in comparison to typical. No group differences or interactions were detected for target processing, and verbal language proficiency was found to predict general reading and inferential skill. The only difference between groups was that individuals with ASD engaged in more re-reading than TD participants. These data suggest that readers with ASD do not differ in the efficiency with which they compute anaphoric links on-line during reading. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1968-1980. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have previously been reported to have difficulties with reading comprehension. This study examined whether a difference in the speed with which individuals with ASD form connections between words (co-reference processing) may contribute to comprehension difficulties. No evidence was found to suggest that ASD readers differ to typically developing readers in the speed of co-reference processing. Therefore, this data would suggest that differences in co-reference processing are unlikely to account for reading comprehension difficulties in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1845