Homograph and homophone readings in Hong Kong bilingual children with autism spectrum disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired development of social communication, cognition, emotions and behavior. This study explores the reading performance of Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD in Hong Kong in relation to local coherence under the Central Coherence Theory. Two tasks were conducted with 22 Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD (M = 9;07), whose mean age was 9 years old and seven months at time of study, and 24 typically developing (TD) controls (M = 9;04), whose mean age was 9 years old and 4 months, to investigate reading at the word and sentence levels. Two groups of participants were matched by chronological age and grade level. Based on the Central Coherence Theory, children with ASD are expected to have difficulty using context to disambiguate between homophones or homographs. We first employed a homograph task using two-character Chinese words to investigate context effects. Participants of both groups were given 40 pairs of words in which the first character provided a contextual cue to the pronunciation of the second, or vice versa. The findings suggested that participants with ASD were able to use the local context to give appropriate pronunciations of the homographs, performing as well as TD participants given the word-level context and explicit instructions. In the homophone task, participants judged the use of homophones based on the content of the sentence. While the results for English homophones were consistent with previous homograph studies, judgements of the Chinese homophones depended instead on the word level. The participants benefitted from the immediate Chinese linguistic context, ignoring global features and focusing on local ones. These two results contradicted previous findings in studies on English where participants with ASD showed difficulty in distinguishing homographs. We suggest this is because in Chinese, one character in a two-character word can serve as a contextual cue to the pronunciation of homographs or usage of homophones. Therefore, immediate linguistic context and local contextual cues facilitate children with ASD’s reading of homographs/homophones in Chinese.