The Impact of Reading Intervention on Brain Responses Underlying Language in Children With Autism.
Teaching autistic children to picture the story in their minds boosts brain activity and reading comprehension.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Tonnsen et al. (2016) tested a picture-in-your-mind reading program. Kids pictured the story while they read.
The children were 8- to 13-year-olds with autism. A wait-list group kept getting their usual lessons.
After the course the team scanned brains and gave reading tests to see if the pictures helped.
What they found
Kids who learned to build mental pictures showed stronger brain activity in vision and language areas.
They also scored higher on reading comprehension tests than the wait-list peers.
How this fits with other research
Vargas (2013) got the same lift in comprehension by giving real objects and pictures during story time. Both studies show that extra visual input helps autistic readers.
Micai et al. (2021) looks like a clash. They saw that autistic teens did not change reading style when the goal changed and comprehension stayed low. The difference: Martina never taught a strategy. L et al. taught the imagery tool, then saw gains.
Foti et al. (2015) review backs the idea. They found that visual supports plus prompting raise content-area comprehension in students with autism. Mental imagery is one more visual support to add to the list.
Why it matters
You can add a quick imagery step to any reading lesson. Stop every paragraph and ask, "What do you see?" This five-minute move may light up both the brain and understanding for your autistic learners.
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Join Free →Pause after each short paragraph and have the learner draw or describe the mental picture before continuing.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Deficits in language comprehension have been widely reported in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), with behavioral and neuroimaging studies finding increased reliance on visuospatial processing to aid in language comprehension. However, no study to date, has taken advantage of this strength in visuospatial processing to improve language comprehension difficulties in ASD. This study used a translational neuroimaging approach to test the role of a visual imagery-based reading intervention in improving the brain circuitry underlying language processing in children with ASD. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in a longitudinal study design, was used to investigate intervention-related change in sentence comprehension, brain activation, and functional connectivity in three groups of participants (age 8-13 years): an experimental group of ASD children (ASD-EXP), a wait-list control group of ASD children (ASD-WLC), and a group of typically developing control children. After intervention, the ASD-EXP group showed significant increase in activity in visual and language areas and right-hemisphere language area homologues, putamen, and thalamus, suggestive of compensatory routes to increase proficiency in reading comprehension. Additionally, ASD children who had the most improvement in reading comprehension after intervention showed greater functional connectivity between left-hemisphere language areas, the middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus while reading high imagery sentences. Thus, the findings of this study, which support the principles of dual coding theory [Paivio 2007], suggest the potential of a strength-based reading intervention in changing brain responses and facilitating better reading comprehension in ASD children.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1503