LAUSR

Abstract Many school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience difficulties with reading comprehension, yet few studies have examined intervention practices to support their early reading comprehension development. The current study used a small randomly assigned treatment control design (N = 12) to investigate the preliminary effects of a listening comprehension intervention on narrative retell, vocabulary, and listening comprehension skills for students with ASD. Children who received the intervention grew significantly on proximal measures of these skills. Significant group differences were noted at post-test on narrative retell ability. Although preliminary, these findings suggest that storybook-based interventions that target the oral language and social-cognitive underpinnings of comprehension development may be successful for school-age children with ASD.