Reading Behaviors through Patterns of Finger-Tracking in Italian Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Area of Science:

• Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition.
• Reading difficulties are common in individuals with ASD.
• Current reading assessment methods may not capture nuanced processing differences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an ecological and portable protocol for collecting reading data in high-functioning children with ASD.
• To investigate reading abilities, including content recognition, reading pace, and comprehension accuracy.
• To explore the relationship between finger movements during reading and underlying cognitive processes in ASD.

Main Methods:

• A novel finger-tracking protocol using tablet touchscreens to record reading behavior.
• Analysis of finger movement data to assess written content recognition, reading pace, and comprehension.
• Comparison of reading patterns between typically developing children and children with ASD.

Main Results:

• Significant differences in reading abilities were observed between typically developing children and those with ASD.
• Children with ASD showed greater reading ability variation, slower reading pace, and less accurate comprehension.
• ASD readers exhibited increased reliance on word length/frequency and reduced prediction-based processing, with a steady reading pace and less attention to punctuation.

Conclusions:

• Finger-tracking patterns suggest ASD readers may struggle to integrate words into syntactic structures.
• Findings support the hypothesis of impaired contextual information use for prediction in ASD.
• Difficulties in reading perception for ASD may stem from impaired predictive processing.