Do readers with autism make bridging inferences from world knowledge?

A Comprehensive Examination of Reading Heterogeneity in Students with High Functioning Autism: Distinct Reading Profiles and Their Relation to Autism Symptom Severity

“…This is consistent with Tager-Flusberg and Joseph's (2003) finding regarding difficulty with open-ended questions, as well as research indicating that children with ASD often have difficulties integrating information from background knowledge with that from the text for global coherence and inference generation (Norbury and Nation 2011;Wahlberg and Magliano 2004). However, some studies have demonstrated that there are aspects of inferencing which may be preserved in children with ASD such as automatic inference generation between sentences in very short passages (Saldaña and Frith 2007) and inferring emotions of main characters in short texts (Tirado and Saldaña 2016). However, Tirado and Saldaña (2016) also found that their participants had difficulty responding to questions about those inferred emotions.…”

“…For example, participants with ASD have been shown to have difficulty integrating background knowledge and inferred knowledge explicitly with global text (Saldaña and Frith 2007), using background knowledge to interpret and remember specific information or resolve ambiguities in discourse (Wahlberg and Magliano 2004), or responding to questions about inferred emotions (Tirado and Saldaña 2016). Language impairment in adolescents with ASD was associated with poorer performance on a passage-level 1 3 inference measure (Norbury and Nation 2011), and in elementary school-aged children verbal ability was the strongest predictor of performance on inferential reading comprehension questions (Lucas and Norbury 2015).…”

Decontextualised Minds: Adolescents with Autism are Less Susceptible to the Conjunction Fallacy than Typically Developing Adolescents

“…However, there is some evidence that autistic people can engage in global processing and show sensitivity to context if explicitly instructed to do so (Snowling and Frith 1986). Nevertheless, this process is not achieved automatically, instead it is relying on effortful processing (Saldana and Frith 2007).…”

“…Autistic people also have difficulty with understanding metaphors and other types of non-literal language, such as irony, especially when this requires picking up and integrating cross-modal cues (Pexman 2008). Importantly, it appears that these effects cannot be attributed to deficits in the automatic inferences involved in text comprehension or to the lack of activation of relevant knowledge (Saldana and Frith 2007).…”

Language and communication in autism spectrum disorders

“…Это, однако, не связано с дефектом процессов первого уровня обработки информации, таких как использование уже наличеству ющих знаний для понимания смысла. Про блемы, по всей видимости, присутствуют на уровнях более высоких [54].…”