The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study
Intensive phonics added to ABA helped a minimally verbal teen with autism and profound ID understand written words for the first time.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with one teen who had autism and profound intellectual disability.
He used only a few words and could not read.
They added daily phonics lessons to his usual ABA program for many months.
The teen learned to match written words to pictures and to follow simple written directions.
What they found
By the end, the teen could understand written words he had never seen before.
He could follow short written instructions like "touch the cup."
These skills showed up slowly but kept growing across the study.
How this fits with other research
Danker et al. (2019) tested a phonics game with verbal elementary students with autism.
Those kids read words better, but their comprehension did not improve.
The difference: our teen had profound ID and almost no speech, while their students could talk.
Macdonald et al. (2021) found that preschoolers with autism and hyperlexia could read words without any phonics teaching.
Again, the kids in that study had strong decoding, while our teen needed step-by-step phonics to grasp any print at all.
Fleury et al. (2018) showed that school-age students with autism keep falling behind in reading comprehension year after year.
Our case gives hope that even a late-starting, minimally verbal adolescent can move forward if phonics is taught intensively within ABA.
Why it matters
Most people assume teens with profound ID and little speech cannot learn to read.
This study shows that adding systematic phonics to daily ABA can build early comprehension.
If you work with minimally verbal adolescents, try short, clear phonics lessons paired with pictures and objects.
Track small gains weekly; they may accumulate into real reading over time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractReading comprehension requires phonics skills, described as “blending phonemes in a word”. Adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often experience poor reading comprehension. The aim of the present study was to explore if it is possible for an adolescent with ASD and intellectual disability to learn reading comprehension skills even without direct teaching, when the focus of the intervention is on teaching phonics skills. An adolescent with ASD, profound intellectual disability and limited behavioral repertoire participated in the study. The participant received intensive ABA‐based interventions according to University of California at Los Angeles‐Young Autism Project (UCLA‐YAP) model and intensive phonics training. Intervention data show emergence of early reading comprehension skills in terms of words/pictures matching and responding to written instructions. It is suggested that implementation of similar interventions could change the opportunities for people with autism who have limited behavioral repertoire and who did not begin an ABA‐based interventions until their adolescence.
Behavioral Interventions, 2024 · doi:10.1002/bin.2007