Correlations for Mean Number of Reading Comprehension Items Correct and Degree of Coherence for Individuals with Autism and Those Developing Typically. Therefore, in this study I will investigate how the components of oral language comprehension work synergistically in reading comprehension and whether individuals with ASD experience difficulties in understanding narrative text. In this section I will discuss the areas of language that are relevant to reading comprehension.
Taken together, the bulk of the evidence suggests that individuals with reading comprehension difficulties are likely to have difficulties that include, but are not limited to, stemming from syntactic deficits. Pragmatic language refers to the social use of communication and has rarely been studied in the context of reading comprehension. Therefore, one of the aims of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between pragmatic language and the reading comprehension performance of individuals with autism.
This means that the decoding ability of individuals with ASD may overestimate functional reading ability. The authors concluded that reading comprehension difficulties experienced by people with autism may stem from problems using background knowledge to interpret what they read. Much of the literature on weak central coherence has examined reading homographs because we can look to the pronunciation of homographs to understand the role of central coherence in the reading comprehension of individuals with autism (Lee, 2005).
Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to examine the effects of cohesion and text type on the reading comprehension of individuals with autism.
Methods
The Vocabulary subtest of the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language-Third Edition (TACL-3; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999) was used to measure students' ability to understand the literal and most common meanings of word classes such as nouns and verbs . The Elaborated Phrases and Sentences subtest of the TACL-4 was used to measure students' understanding of syntactically based word relationships and elaborated sentence structures. It is a widely used standardized test that is normed based on the 2000 census profiles and four major geographic regions of the United States.
The Paragraph Comprehension of Syntax subtest in CASL was used to measure students' ability to understand passages of increasing syntactic complexity. The pragmatic assessment subtest of the CASL was used to measure students' awareness and use of appropriate language in response to everyday situations. After hearing each scenario, each student rated the appropriateness of the language a character used in response to each scenario.
The Problem Solving subtest of the Test of Problem Solving-Third Elementary Edition (TOPS-E 3; Bowers, Huisingh & LoGiudice, 2005) measured students' language-based thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving skills necessary for competence social. In response to each story, each student answered a series of questions about one of the six main areas. It was normed for individuals from each quadrant of the United States and multiple SES levels.
Coh-Metrix (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse & Cai, 2004) is a computational tool that has been used to produce indices of linguistic and discourse characteristics of texts used to measure reading comprehension (i.e. GMRT, GRADE) . It was specifically designed to investigate explicit text cohesion and mental coherence. First, I measured text narrativity, that is, the degree to which a text displayed features of narrative text, using the PC Text Facilitation Percent Narrative score found under the Text Facilitation Principal Component Scores ".
Second, deep cohesion was measured using the “Text Ease PC Deep cohesion percentile” score. Third, referential cohesion was measured using the "PC Easability Text Referential Cohesion Percentile". This means that the performance of paragraphs that fell in the range of 40-60 was percentile, discarded and not evaluated in this study to establish a true dichotomy.
Results
Correlational analysis was conducted to determine the relationship between pragmatic language skills and reading comprehension performance for individuals with ASD. I predicted a priori that there would be a significant relationship between these variables because Ricketts et al. 2013) showed that social behavior and social cognition contributed to reading comprehension performance. Additionally, multiple linear regression was conducted to determine whether the narrativity scale predicted reading comprehension performance better than the cohesion scale.
Although all three predictor variables significantly predicted reading comprehension performance, the narrativity scale did not predict reading comprehension to a significantly greater degree than each of the cohesion variables, which was not predicted (See Table 3). . Welch's Two Sample t-test was used to determine whether individuals with ASD perform better on high-cohesion texts compared to typically developing peers. It was predicted that because poor central coherence has been reported as a trait known to limit comprehension skills in this population, texts containing a high degree of cohesion should enable better reading comprehension performance and perhaps result in a relative "proficiency" for this type of text.
Analysis showed that individuals with ASD performed significantly worse on texts that contained a high degree of referential coherence than typically developing individuals. Similar performance was observed on texts containing a high degree of causal association with the ASD group. Welch's Two Sample t-test was used to determine whether individuals with ASD perform better on high-context texts than low-context texts.
Correlational analysis, which is traditionally the best metric to observe individual relationships between text cohesion (causal and referent) and reading comprehension performance in both ASD and TD groups, showed no significant relationship. A major limitation with correlational analyses, as currently constructed, is that it observes the relationship between the mean reading comprehension scores per passage and the degree of cohesion (causal and referential) per passage, leaving only five degrees of freedom, since CLASS contains six passages. As an alternative, post-hoc analysis of variance was used to examine the relationship between text cohesion and reading comprehension.
Because it was expected that levels of cohesion would generally be associated with better performance on reading comprehension and that typically developing individuals were expected to perform better than people with ASD, analysis of variance between these groups on deep comprehension would and referential cohesion should support these assumptions. Repeated measures ANOVA comparing the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension at low causal cohesion, high causal cohesion, low referential cohesion, and high referential cohesion. Finally, there were no significant correlations between the level of cohesion and reading comprehension in either group.
Discussion
Relationships between pragmatic language, text type and reading comprehension One of the most compelling questions in this study was the relationship between pragmatic language skills and reading comprehension in individuals with ASD. However, analyzes revealed a strong positive correlation between pragmatic language skills and reading comprehension on narrative and expository texts. Indeed, it has been well documented that individuals with ASD generally perform worse on reading comprehension measures.
This study confirmed that individuals with ASD are impaired in reading comprehension in general and narrative comprehension in particular. Statistically, lack of power limited the ability to observe a significant relationship between causal cohesion and reading comprehension performance in the TD group. First, it supports the idea that pragmatic language skills are related to the reading comprehension performance of individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
Second, we observed a strong negative relationship between causality and reading comprehension performance in the TD group but not in the ASD group, although it was not significant due to the way it was analyzed. Finally, this study attempted to observe the impact of textual features on the reading comprehension performance of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Group differences in performance on reading comprehension texts containing high referential context and high causal context.
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