Six Good Predictors of Autistic Text Comprehension

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 697–706, Hissar, Bulgaria, Sep 7–9 2015. Six Good Predictors of Autistic Text Comprehension Victoria Yaneva Research Group in Computational Linguistics University of Wolverhampton V.Yaneva@wlv.ac.uk Richard Evans Research Group in Computational Linguistics University of Wolverhampton R.J.Evans@wlv.ac.uk Abstract This paper presents our investigation of the ability of 33 readability indices to ac- count for the reading comprehension dif- ficulty posed by texts for people with autism. The evaluation by autistic read- ers of 16 text passages is described, a pro- cess which led to the production of the first text collection for which readability has been evaluated by people with autism. We present the findings of a study to determine which of the 33 indices can successfully discriminate between the difficulty levels of the text passages, as determined by our reading experiment involving autistic par- ticipants. The discriminatory power of the indices is further assessed through their application to the FIRST corpus which consists of 25 texts presented in their origi- nal form and in a manually simplified form (50 texts in total), produced specifically for readers with autism. 1 Introduction Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a develop- mental disorder of neural origin, characterised by impairment in communication and social interac- tion and stereotyped repetitive behaviour (Amer- ican Psychiatric Association, 2013). Currently about 1 in 100 people in the UK are diagnosed with this condition (Brugha et al., 2012), and there are assumed to be two undiagnosed cases for ev- ery three diagnosed (Baron-Cohen et al., 2009). In many countries there are no official statistics about the number of affected individuals, but with rising awareness of the condition, this number has been continually increasing to the extent that it is now referred to as an autism epidemic (Wazana, 2007). One of the central characteristics of autism is impairment in communication both in terms of language comprehension and social interac- tion. Depending on the severity with which the condition affects individuals, they may be low- functioning and often non-verbal or medium and high-functioning, requiring help with only the so- cial aspects of language use. While most medium- and high-functioning autistic people have a high level of word decoding skills when reading, they struggle at semantic, syntactic and most of all, pragmatic levels of understanding. For example it may be challenging for autistic readers to ac- cess the meaning of some words if they are very abstract or are too long; they may have difficulty in processing long and complex sentences due to the cognitive load that these impose on the reader and the comparatively short working memory span that people with autism may have (Bennetto et al., 1996). However, the area of utmost difficulty for autistic individuals, which differentiates them from non-autistic readers in the way that they read, is their inability to “refer to the whole”, to strug- gle to infer meaning from both the semantic and the social context of a text (Frith and Snowling, 1983; Happ´e, 1997). These characteristics of their …

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