Minimally verbal autistic people demonstrate familiarity with spelling patterns, a new study suggests. But several communication researchers who were

Some minimally verbal autistic people show signs of written-language familiarity, study suggests

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2024-05-09 21:30:05

Minimally verbal autistic people demonstrate familiarity with spelling patterns, a new study suggests. But several communication researchers who were not involved in the work say they worry the finding could be used to support a controversial communication method.

In the study, 31 teenagers and adults with autism played a letter-tapping game reminiscent of Whac-A-Mole on a tablet computer, says lead investigator Vikram Jaswal, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. The participants tapped letters on an alphabetical grid as they flashed one at a time. In some trials, the flashing letters spelled out a meaningful sentence that the researchers had previously read aloud to the participants.

About half of the participants tapped the letters faster when they were part of a meaningful sentence or common letter pairing (such as “he”). They also tapped letters faster than nonsense symbols and paused before tapping the first letter of a new word in the sentence.

These participants showed “foundational literacy skills,” Jaswal says, though hyperlexia, or an intense fascination with letters, could also explain these results, his team states in the study. The paper was published 21 February in Autism.