One of the 4 R’s
August 29, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
My son Charlie starts school in a week: He is in the (gulp) 5th grade, and has one more year to go before entering middle school. Reading has long been hard for Charlie. He does Edmark and Distar at school, has a special reading curriculum with his Lovaas program at home, and I’ve started doing online programs like Headsprout with him. It is slow-going for Charlie, who never showed signs of hyperlexia. Indeed, Charlie often seems to have to work really hard to see the letters of a word as one unit and to distinguish between “B” and “D,” and he is only sporadically interested in being read to, and then only for a few minutes.
Some recently noted articles about autism and reading have helped me to further reflect on Charlie’s learning-to-read odyssey.
In Lexical knowledge and lexical use in autism in the August 2006 Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (Vol. 36, No. 6.), researchers studied “anomalous vocabulary use in a 70,000-word corpus of conversational autistic language” and found that “concept formation, and hence vocabulary, is abnormal in autism.” But just because formation of concepts of vocabulary used is “abnormal in autism” does not mean that an autistic person does not know the actual means of the words used. He or she may use them in unusual ways, but the words still have meaning, though not the one that is usually expected. For instance, my son used to say “sushi” when he was upset. He was not necessarily hungry at that very moment, but (as we discerned over time) seemed to be saying “sushi” because, sushi being one of his favorite foods, saying the word had associations of comfort. As the researchers conclude,
underlying lexical knowledge in autism may not necessarily be reflected in lexical use.
That is, a child’s actual knowledge of what words means may not be reflected in their use of the words: As far as I can tell, Charlie does seem to use a number of words in ways that most people do not understand. “Stairs” means “go away.” “Tickle” means “come on over here! “Blue ocean” sometimes means “swimming pool.” (Yes, we do try to model other phrases for Charlie to say as well as longer phrases, but sometimes in the heat of the moment, one just says “Okay, fine, let’s go……”)
Another study in the October 2006 Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (Vol. 36, No. 7) looks at patterns of reading ability in autistic children. 41 autistic children were studied and some were found to “read accurately but showed very poor comprehension, consistent with a hyperlexia reading profile,” while others “were poor at reading words and nonwords whereas others were unable to decode nonwords, despite a reasonable level of word reading skill.”
The conclusion—-that there is a “heterogeneous nature of reading skills in children with ASD”—-seems rather unremarkable (41 autistic children varied in their reading skills) but it is helpful to me to think about the abilities the researchers noted. Some readers can read the words on the page fine but do not comprehend what they read, while others struggled to make sense of new words (or “nonwords”). And some are simply “poor at reading words and nonwords”; I guess this is Charlie, who has been learning nouns as sight words flash card by flashcard. He is learning phonics and does not yet have the concept down of “sounding a word out.” Figuring out what the letters are saying and connecting those sounds to a word, to meaning, to cite another study, are both difficult for Charlie. Reading is a lot of steps for Charlie; he has to draw on his visual processing, cognitive and attention skills, memory, and much more—a lot to pull together.
But when words are set to music, Charlie is all attention and remembers long phrases. During our beach vacation, Jim got him interested in this band and there is new music from a familiar voice coming from the back seat of the car.
And what Charlie can read, is music.
Charlie’s a Clash fan! All this, and great taste in music too! Awesome.
My son was not hyperlexic but did learn to read early. When he showed signs of sight-reading, I would write the “picture” of the word in its original form. For example, he memorized the Sesame Street logo (on the green street sign). I copied that, then wrote it in green without the sign shape. Then I wrote the words in pen, lastly writing the words in different context.
Essentially he learned to generalize and predict what words would be and sound like before he actually learned how to read. He’s at least a grade ahead in reading and now seems to be at grade level for comprehension.
I think using cartoons instead of photos has helped him with generalizing and sequencing.
Haven’t tried cartoons—that’s a great idea!
Ellyn Arwood, Apricot, Inc. Look up their stuff, Kristina–she’s based out of the University of Portland (Oregon), and has a whole curriculum based on cartooning and flowcharting. She started out focusing on semantic/pragmatic disorder issues and is now working on autism issues.
I used Apricot’s materials (the website is complicated but it’s easily googled with Apricot+ Arwood)with my son for writing, but other people have used it for reading. I will be using it along with other methods in my reading classroom this fall. Her methods are very, very visual and she was a lifesaver for me when we went through the hell of 6th grade.
My older boy could read when he was two and a half – but he lost that skill, so we had to start from scratch.
He reads each word from the outside letter at each end and works inwards. He’s good at recognizing the ’shape’ of a word and good at guessing! It is really hard for him to isolate words [vision therapy]
Hoping we’ll find out more about what’s going on inside him soon.
Best wishes
Thanks for the suggestion, joycemocha!
The Spire reading method is the “latest and greatest” methodology here in our district (in MO). Bubba is progressing (after a year of remaining at the same level), though I don’t know if it’s the method or finally getting some 1:1 help with the skill. As we assumed, once he started feeling successful, he started to progress more quickly. He loves reading aloud in class, but only if they are short chunks of text (no more than 3 sentences).
Does he like books on tape? Charlie likes to listen to music; maybe listening to stories on tape or CD would be enjoyable.
The problem is that we have no dial on the back of the head to measure speech comprehension. The only way we have to assess it is by taking in what the person says or does in response. This means, among other things, that it’s easy to treat an expressive problem as if it were a comprehension problem. If someone says ’sushi’ at an inappropriate moment this may mean that they have a language dysfunction, or it may mean that they were trying to say “The world is a harsh and hostile place where we are merely puppets of an unimaginably malign and powerful demiurge” and it came out “sushi”. Don’t look in a diagnosis of language dysfunction without more exploration. Not that you are, of course.
Thank you for posting the link to those studies. My son has hyperlexia tendencies but he mostly memorizes the spelling (sight/word reading). He knows phonic sounds for all letters (from Leapfrog videos and toys), so right now I’m working on helping him make the leap to reading novel words using his phonics knowledge. I’m definetely going to check Headsprout.
One specialist from California recommended another site with free interactive reading activities that my son has enjoyed so far:
http://www.starfall.com