The ability to understand what one reads, or reading comprehension, is central to academic success. For many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), reading comprehension is a noted area of challenge. For children with typical development, it is well established that successful reading comprehension requires two broad skills: word reading and oral language. For children with ASD, word reading is often believed to be relatively intact, even in the face of poor reading comprehension, suggesting that deficits in oral language, more than in word reading, underlie reading comprehension deficits. Yet, extant research has suggested the importance of both skills. To clarify the role of these skills in the reading comprehension of children with ASD, we conducted a meta‐analysis. ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Proquest Dissertation & Theses were searched for studies of reading comprehension in children with ASD, published up to May 2019. We identified 26 relevant studies about children with ASD (aged 6–18 years) that included both a measure of word reading and reading comprehension. Hunt‐Schmidt Random Effects Models showed similar mean correlations between reading comprehension and the component skills of word reading (M r = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]) and oral language (M r = 0.61 [0.33–0.88]). These findings demonstrate that these skills are essential for reading comprehension in children with ASD, making contributions of similar size. This study advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which children with ASD understand what they read, providing a foundation on which to build programmatic research into each of these mechanisms.

中文翻译：

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构建意义：支持自闭症谱系障碍儿童阅读能力的构成技能的荟萃分析

理解阅读内容或理解能力的能力是学术成功的关键。对于许多患有自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的儿童来说，阅读理解是一个值得注意的挑战领域。对于具有典型发育的儿童，众所周知，成功的阅读理解需要两项广泛的技能：单词阅读和口语。对于自闭症儿童来说，即使面对较弱的阅读理解能力，也常常认为单词阅读是相对完整的，这表明口头表达能力不足而不是单词阅读能力是阅读能力不足的根本原因。然而，现有的研究表明这两种技能的重要性。为了阐明这些技能在ASD儿童阅读理解中的作用，我们进行了荟萃分析。ERIC，PsycINFO，PubMed和Proquest论文＆检索了这些文献以寻找截至2019年5月的ASD儿童的阅读理解研究。我们确定了26项有关ASD儿童（6至18岁）的相关研究，其中既包括单词阅读能力，也包括阅读理解能力。Hunt-Schmidt随机效应模型显示了阅读理解与单词阅读的构成技巧之间的相似均值相关性（M r  = 0.65 [0.27–1.03]）和口语（M r  = 0.61 [0.33-0.88]）。这些发现表明，这些技能对于自闭症儿童的阅读理解至关重要，做出的贡献也差不多。这项研究提高了我们对自闭症儿童理解其阅读机制的理解，为将编程研究纳入这些机制的基础奠定了基础。