Cognitive and linguistic correlates of character reading among Chinese pre-school children with autism

Abstract

PURPOSE: Current diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) revolve around communicative features (e.g., impaired patterns of conversational initiation and response, stereotypical and repetitive use of language), with little attention paid to literacy skills, such as word reading. This study explored the cognitive and linguistic correlates of character reading in Chinese preschool children with ASD. METHOD: Participants were 51 typically developing (TD) children and 47 children with ASD matched on chronicle age (M = 4.47, SD = 1.19), in an inclusive kindergarten in China. All participants were administered on the task of Chinese character recognition, and a set of cognitive tasks including rapid automated naming (RAN), theory of mind, inhibitory control, digit span, non-verbal IQ, as well as oral language skills such as vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and listening comprehension. Additionally, the Putonghua Communicative Development Inventories (PCDI) were administered to the caregivers of these children. RESULTS: Our correlation analyses revealed that, unlike TD children’s character reading, which was correlated with all the measured cognitive and linguistic skills, ASD children’s character reading was only significantly correlated with RAN, inhibitory control, phonological awareness, and PCDI. RAN and phonological awareness uniquely associated with character reading among ASD children even after controlling for inhibitory control, vocabulary, morphological awareness, listening comprehension and PCDI. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that phonological awareness and RAN may serve as pre-markers for difficulties in emergent literacy acquisition in Chinese ASD children. Focusing on word-level literacy skills, a possible asset for children with ASD, is practically meaningful.