978-1572305441

Frankie 169
there are many children with nonverbal learning disability who do not
have AS. Nevertheless the confusion continues in the literature.
Once we cleared up the diagnosis, Harry’s parents wanted some
help on instructional strategies to improve his school performance. To
do this, it was important to explain to them the kinds of difficulties that
children with ASD demonstrate in cognitive testing. This subject has
been researched thoroughly, and the results are fairly consistent. In fact,
some researchers see autism as primarily an information-processing disorder,
a convincing explanation as long as that includes the processing
of social information as well.
The most common finding in ASD is a discrepancy between verbal
and nonverbal cognitive skills; that is, children with autism are said to
have good nonverbal skills and poor verbal skills. This is reflected in
their scores on IQ tests, where the verbal scores are often well below
their nonverbal scores, based on tests of matching, copying, pattern recognition,
rote memory, and so on. As mentioned earlier, children with
AS may have the opposite pattern: good verbal and relatively poor nonverbal
skills. This may seem paradoxical given that both are forms of
ASD. In fact, perhaps a better explanation of cognitive difficulties in
ASD than the verbal–nonverbal discrepancy is provided by differentiating
rote skills from the more complex skills of integration and using
contextual cues. Children with ASD (both those with autism and those
with AS) tend to have relatively good rote skills, whether in the verbal
or nonverbal domains. That is why somebody like Harry was able to
read at such an early age: He had excellent rote skills in both visual–
spatial processing (so he could recognize groups of letters and organize
them into sounds and syllables) and basic rote verbal skills (so he could
sound the letters out). It was true that he couldn’t understand much of
what he read, but his ability to sound out the letters and syllables was
excellent. As a result, Harry and other children with ASD often have
good word recognition skills but poor comprehension of a paragraph or
a sentence. As long as the task is simple and relies on rote skills, the
child is able to learn easily. But as the children develop, performance on
more complex tasks (whether verbal or nonverbal) falls off more rapidly
in children with ASD than in typically developing children. This leads
to an inefficiency in learning, poor use of contextual clues to understand
a problem, and a failure to use organizing strategies to process
new information. In other words, children with ASD find it difficult to
learn by rote in one situation and apply it to another. This is probably