Projects

From Cognitive to Chinese Reading Comprehension ability: A 3-year longitudinal study on Chinese Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.  

Theory of mind deficit is a very distinguishing feature in children with autism spectrum disorder, explaining their inability or difficulties in inferring one’s mental state, predicting and justifying one’s behaviors. Such a complex neuro-developmental disorder does not only affect one’s social and communicative abilities, but it has been suggested to have enticed reading comprehension difficulties, in narrative text reading in particular (e.g. Wong & Tong, submitted; Nation et al., 2006; Brown, Oram-Cardy & Johnson, 2013). Our pilot study on school-age children with ASD has demonstrated that, the existing reading problem has a positive correlation with their theory of mind impairment (Wong & Tong, submitted). However, it remains unclear about the relationship between Theory of Mind and reading comprehension deficit, and the source of this relationship. 

​This project aims at uncovering the origin of such comprehension deficits by comparing one’s cognitive, linguistics, social emotion abilities, and thus exploring their contributions to reading comprehension ability for three consecutive years between Chinese children with ASD and Chinese children who are typically developing. This project is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC)/General Research Fund. We are now inviting children with ASD and typically developing children from Grade 3 to Grade 4 to participate.

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