Is It Common For Children With Autism To Be Able To Speak And Read, Yet Have Problems With Reading Comprehension?

Oct. 23, 2008 -- Question: Is it common for children with autism to be able to speak and read, yet have problems with reading comprehension?

Answer: Reading comprehension might be a special challenge for children with autism because they tend to learn by rote. They don't tend to modify information that they take in to fit a particular situation. They try to apply templates that they've picked up here and there to fit the situation. They may repeat something verbatim from a commercial or a movie or something that was said a few minutes before. They may even fail to correct the pronouns, 'I' and 'you' for example.

So they have trouble reworking and handling things intuitively that they wish to express. That's not a unique problem to autism. There are other children who have trouble comprehending what they're able to read. But there's probably a special predilection to that in the case of autism.