More and Less Social Comprehension: Child and Text Factors for Autistic Children
University of Kansas Medical Center
Summary
The goal of this early Phase 1 clinical trial is to assess if the social content of a story impacts autistic children's listening comprehension of stories. The main questions this study aims to answer are: * Does removing social content from a story improve listening comprehension in autistic children? * Does listening comprehension of more social versus less social stories differentially predict performance on a standardized reading comprehension measure? Participants will listen to more social and less social stories while viewing accompanying pictures and answer comprehension questions about the stories and complete a standardized assessment of reading comprehension. In addition, participants complete measures of their nonverbal cognition, hearing status, autism severity, language abilities, and social communication abilities to help characterize individual differences in participants.
Description
Listening comprehension is an important predictor of later reading comprehension, academic success, health, psychosocial, and vocational outcomes; yet roughly 65% of autistic school-age children have poor comprehension. Non-autistic comprehension of more social (e.g., narrative) texts is better than less social (e.g., expository texts) because non-autistic individuals can bootstrap their real-world social understanding to better understand the text. In contrast, autistic comprehension of less social texts has been shown in a small pilot study to be better than more social texts, which is likel…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 9–12 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: * Has a community or educational autism diagnosis (based on parent report); * Is between the ages of 9;0 to 12;11 (years; months); * Uses verbal phrase-level spoken language (based on parent report). Exclusion Criteria: * Speaks more than one language (based on parent report); * Has a known chromosomal abnormality (e.g., Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome; based on parent report); * Has an intellectual impairment or cognitive disability (IQ \< 70; based on parent report); * Has Cerebral palsy (based on parent report); * Uncorrected visual impairments (based on parent repo…
Interventions
- BehavioralMore Social Stories
Children listen to four stories while looking at accompanying images that contain more social information (e.g., characters referencing, dialogue, mental and emotional state words, and narrativity) as measured by a text analysis.
- BehavioralLess Social Stories
Children listen to four stories while looking at accompanying images that contain less social information (e.g., characters referencing, dialogue, mental and emotional state words, and narrativity) as measured by a text analysis.
Location
- University of Kansas Comprehension and Language Learning LabLawrence, Kansas