| Students with ASD may be able to read accurately, but their reading comprehension is often impaired. A number of studies have shown that they have difficulty integrating information, understanding and resolving anaphora, understanding jokes, answering inferential questions, and combining parts of a text into a coherent whole (O'Connor & Klein, 2004). Although several studies have shown that some children with ASD are poor comprehenders, there is little research on the role pronouns play in the reading comprehension of children with ASD.;The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of pronouns in reading comprehension by determining whether correlations exist between measures of sight word vocabulary, the use of pronouns, pronoun reversals, and the reading comprehension of Chinese-American children with ASD. Three research questions were examined in this study. The first research question examined if there is a relationship between basic sight vocabulary and the reading comprehension of Chinese-American children with ASD. The second research question examined the relationship between the use of pronouns and the reading comprehension of Chinese-American children with ASD in terms of the use of subject pronouns, object pronouns, and possessive pronouns. The third research question examined the relationship between pronoun reversals and the reading comprehension of Chinese-American children with ASD in terms of production and comprehension. Statistically significant positive correlations were found with reading comprehension for sight vocabulary and all of the pronoun variables. Results are discussed in terms of study limitations and implications. |
