Vocabulary And Sentence Problems And Educational Suggestions For Children With Autism In The First Grade Of Primary School

Understanding the meaning of textual material through reading is one of the basic skills that children in first grade need to acquire.However,a review of Western and Chinese studies found that children with autism have reading comprehension deficits,which are particularly evident in sentence and text reading.In the context of the current national advocacy for the participation of children with special needs in integrated education,exploring targeted reading instruction strategies will help children with autism who have just started school to overcome difficulties and adapt to school life as soon as possible,as well as provide a psychological basis for school instruction.In this study,two experiments were carried out investigate the differences between Chinese children with autism and typically developing children in terms of vocabulary recognition and sentence comprehension.Experiment 1 selected 7 autistic children and 11 typically developing children as participants to explore the mastery of three categories of vocabulary comprehension: nouns,verbs,and adjectives between first grade autistic children and typically developing children.Experiment 2conducted the Eyelnik protable DUO eyetracker device to explore the differences between children with autism spectrum disorders and typically developing children in reading correct and semantic violation sentences,and further analyzed the characteristics of children with autism when reading sentences through eye-tracking data.The experimental results showed that（1）in terms of vocabulary recognition,among the three types of vocabulary,children with ASD had significantly lower correct rates of verb and adjective comprehension than children with TD;（2）in terms of correct sentence processing rates,children with ASD had significantly lower correct rates of processing semantic violation sentence tasks than children with TD;（3）in terms of eye movement indicators,children with ASD had longer total and mean gaze times and more gaze times.The main conclusion of the experiment: children with autism in the first grade had both vocabulary and sentence comprehension deficits.（1）In terms of vocabulary comprehension,among the three categories of nouns,verbs,and adjectives,children with high-functioning autism had lower vocabulary comprehension of verbs and adjectives than typically developing children.（2）In terms of sentence comprehension,children with high-functioning autism had the same ability as typically developing children to process simple sentences normally,however,they were less able to process semantic violations and showed lower reading efficiency.Based on the results of this experiment,the following educational recommendations are made for teaching reading to children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders.Instruction should be tailored to the reading characteristics of children with autism spectrum disorders.First,in terms of vocabulary recognition:（1）Focus on strengthening the teaching of verb and adjective vocabulary comprehension in children with high-functioning autism.（2）Focus on vocabulary size as well as on the understanding of word meanings for children with high-functioning autism.In the area of sentence reading:（1）Improve autism children’s understanding of Chinese word meanings.（2）To improve the reading efficiency of children with autism.