Child-Parent Interaction Quality Shows Opposite Relationships with Language Comprehension Skill and Autism...

Childhood literacy predicts long-term learning outcomes and comprises decoding and linguistic comprehension skills. Decoding involves pattern recognition and sentence parsing, while linguistic comprehension requires understanding semantic context. Each component may differentially relate to social processing, carrying implications for reading among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who often exhibit atypical social processing and communication.

We investigated relationships between social behavior patterns and literacy subskills among children aged 6-11 with (n = 18) and without (n = 27) ASD. We examined associations between behavioral attunement during a cooperative task between children and their parent, children's scores on standardized reading assessments, and children's autism symptoms. Behavioral attunement was coded through video recordings of child-parent interactions.

Controlling for general intelligence, behavioral attunement was positively associated with reading comprehension and negatively associated with phonemic decoding and autism symptom severity in neurotypical and autistic children. While behavioral attunement's positive relationship with reading comprehension was driven by the subsample with ASD, its negative relationships with phonemic decoding and autism symptoms were only present for the full sample.

These findings support a significant influence of social processing on linguistic comprehension skills, particularly among children with ASD, as well as an influence of autism symptoms on behavioral attunement, even in children without a formal ASD diagnosis.