Performance of Children with Autism on Selected Measures of Reading Achievement and Cognitive-Linguistic Ability

Abstract

This study examined the performance of children with autism on selected measures of reading achievement and cognitive-linguistic ability. How children with autism performed on three reading achievement measures, Letter-Word Identification, PassageComprehension, and Oral Reading Fluency, and two cognitive-linguistic measures, Rapid Letter Naming and Segmenting of Words were analyzed to determine if there were anydifferences between their performance and those of both their normative and special education counterparts. Results revealed that children with autism scored significantly lower on all three measures of reading achievement and both cognitive-linguistic skillsthan their normative counterparts. Children with autism scored significantly lower on only one of the reading measures, Passage Comprehension and both cognitive-linguistic measures than their special education counterparts. Findings from this study provideadditional support for previous research which purports that children with autism demonstrate impairments in cognitive-linguistic tasks that require phonological processing, rapid automatic naming, oral language, and reading comprehension and may help practitioners in the identification of children with autism.