Main photo: Dr Sarah Hinchey (top) and Professor Catherine Theys (left) during a child's EEG session in the University of Canterbury Speech-Language Neuroscience Lab.
The findings could help teachers better tailor reading strategies for autistic learners in classrooms and may offer insights for caregivers supporting autistic children with reading at home.
Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) researcher Dr Sarah Hinchey has found that common classroom reading strategies may not support autistic children's comprehension in the same ways as other learners.
Her research found that autistic children, as a group, showed stronger comprehension when reading sentences aloud compared with reading with picture supports, challenging the assumption that visual aids always help autistic learners.
Dr Hinchey says the research was inspired by observing her autistic daughter's reading behaviours.
"She struggled to understand what she was reading when reading silently, but didn't seem to have the same difficulty when reading aloud," she says. "That observation sparked my interest in understanding how autistic students make sense of what they read."
"In classrooms, multisensory strategies like picture books or visual supports are often used to help children understand what they read," Dr Hinchey says. "But we don't yet fully understand whether these approaches support or hinder comprehension for autistic children."
Some autistic children may appear to read fluently but still struggle to understand what they are reading, she says.
"For some autistic children, comprehension difficulties may not become obvious until around the age of eight or nine, when students begin reading to learn rather than learning to read.
Dr Hinchey's PhD research examined reading comprehension in autistic children aged eight to 12 years of age, using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity while they completed reading tasks. The study compared three common classroom approaches: reading silently, reading aloud and reading silently with picture supports.
Children also completed standardised assessments measuring reading ability, language, IQ and working memory. Despite autistic and non-autistic participants achieving similar results in most of these assessments, the EEG results showed clear differences in how the two groups processed reading comprehension.
"Our EEG experiment revealed that autistic and non-autistic groups showed different patterns of reading comprehension across the three sensory conditions," Dr Hinchey says.
When reading aloud, autistic children showed significantly stronger brain signals linked to comprehension than during reading with picture supports.
The research highlights the importance of tailoring reading strategies to individual learners.
"Reading aloud may benefit some autistic children, but what works for one child may not work for another," Dr Hinchey says.
"These can have important implications for teachers and speech-language therapists supporting autistic learners."
Dr Hinchey conducted the research with what she describes as a multidisciplinary supervisory "dream team" at UC, including Professor Catherine Theys (School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing, Faculty of Science), Associate Professor Donald Derrick (NZ Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour at UC) and Dr Jayne Newbury (School of Psychology, Speech and Hearing, Faculty of Science).
Now working as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Child Well-being Research Institute, Dr Hinchey is continuing this work by trialling reading supports for autistic children, including text-to-speech applications, again using EEG to better understand how these tools support reading comprehension.
