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Updated: Mar 30, 2026

Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism
Published on: October 3, 2018
Readers with Autism Can Produce Inferences, but they Cannot Answer Inferential Questions
Maria J Tirado1, David Saldaña2
1Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Seville, C/Camilo Jose Cela, s/n, 41018, Seville, Spain. mjtirado@us.es.
Abstract:
Readers with autism (ASD), poor comprehension (PC), and typical development (TD) took part in three reading experiments requiring the production of inferences. In Experiments 1 and 2 reading times for target phrases-placed immediately after text implicitly indicating the emotion of a protagonist or after a number of filler sentences, respectively--were used as measures of inferencing. In Experiment 3, participants were explicitly asked to identify the protagonist's emotion. There were no significant differences among groups in Experiment 1. Compared to TD readers, the PC group performed poorly in Experiments 2 and 3. ASD readers performed worse than PC participants only in the explicit-question task. Although ASD readers can produce inferences, they respond to questions about them with difficulty.
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