What Do We Know About the Home Literacy and Numeracy Environments of Autistic Preschoolers? A Systematic Review.
Say the word, don’t point—verbal-only prompts pull autistic preschoolers’ eyes to print in digital storybooks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched autistic preschoolers read a digital storybook on a tablet.
An eye-tracker measured where the child looked.
Sometimes the adult said only the target word.
Other times the adult said the word and pointed to the text or picture.
The goal was to see which prompt pulled the child’s eyes to print or pictures.
What they found
Verbal-only prompts worked best for moving eyes to the words.
The effect grew larger as autism traits increased.
Adding a pointing cue did not help and sometimes hurt.
Kids still looked at pictures no matter which prompt was used.
How this fits with other research
Ferguson et al. (2020) showed autistic children look less at books to begin with.
Sarah et al. now show a simple verbal cue can fix that gap.
Lo et al. (2021) taught parents to prompt at home and saw better story talk.
The new lab study says start with just the word—skip the finger.
Benson-Goldberg et al. (2021) used eye-tracking with one CDKL5 child and also saw print looks rise after parent prompts.
Together the papers say: prompt, but keep it verbal and light.
Why it matters
You can boost print attention in minutes without extra tools.
Next time you share a digital book, name the printed word and wait.
Drop the point.
Kids with stronger autism traits will benefit most.
Watch their eyes to be sure the cue lands.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Prompting children to look at print and picture content during shared book reading (SBR) facilitates joint attention and early language and literacy learning opportunities for typically developing (TD) children. Whether preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) respond similarly to bids for joint attention during SBR and how autism characteristics impact upon their responsiveness is currently unclear. This is important given these children are at risk of persistent language and literacy challenges. To address this, we examined the effects of prompts that were solely verbal versus verbal with pointing on visual attention to print and picture targets during SBR with digital storybooks for 34 children with ASD and 27 TD peers. Children with ASD looked as frequently at print targets, but less frequently at picture targets, when prompted compared to TD peers. Both prompt types showed similar effects in shifting children's visual attention to print and picture targets at group level. When groups were combined, autism characteristics influenced children's responsiveness to verbal versus verbal with pointing prompts to print targets, but not to picture targets; children looked more frequently at print targets as autism characteristics increased when verbal prompts were used, with a large effect shown (d = 0.91). Overall, findings suggest that prompting children with ASD to look at print and pictures during SBR with digital storybooks may be helpful in facilitating joint attention to storybook content. Implications for the development of effective early interventions aimed at providing emergent literacy support for children with ASD are discussed. LAY SUMMARY: We looked at how prompting impacted upon where children with autism look during shared book reading with digital storybooks compared to children without autism using eye-tracking. We found the target (pictures or print) was what mattered and number of autism characteristics impacted how responsive children were to different types of prompts. This helps us to understand how prompting may help children with autism to look at print or pictures during shared book reading which could support language or reading interventions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1002/aur.2623