Schedule of Events | Symposia

Inferencing During Visual and Verbal Narrative Comprehension in Autism: An EEG Study

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Emily Coderre¹ (emily.coderre@med.uvm.edu), Devon Kearns¹, Olivia Ciocca¹, Holly Chappell², Caitlyn Soong², Nicole Sperrazza², Emily Zane², Neil Cohn³; ¹University of Vermont, ²James Madison University, ³Tilburg University

Autistic individuals sometimes struggle with understanding stories told verbally (i.e., through written/spoken language) and visually (e.g., comics). Inferencing abilities help comprehenders interpret implicit information by filling in the gaps between explicit events in both visual and verbal modalities. Autistic individuals sometimes show difficulties with inferencing, which could contribute to comprehension difficulties in autism that should extend to both verbal and visual narrative comprehension. However, no studies have directly compared inferencing in autistic individuals across modalities. We collected EEG data from 52 participants (mean age=25, range=18-65) with a range of autistic traits (measured by the Autism Quotient: M=21, range=4-44) during two inferencing tasks. In the visual domain, participants viewed 6-panel comic strips (normal condition) or 5-panel strips in which the panel depicting the narrative climax was removed (inference condition). In the verbal domain, participants read 5-sentence stories (normal) or 4-sentence stories in which the climactic sentence was dropped (inference). Participants also completed measures of visual language fluency and reading comprehension. In the visual modality, fluency interacted with autistic traits in late time windows (900-1000 ms). With high visual language fluency, the level of autistic traits did not impact inferencing abilities; when fluency was low, greater autistic traits were associated with larger positivities. In the verbal modality, higher autistic traits were associated with larger early negativities (200-300 ms) regardless of reading comprehension scores, possibly indicating an earlier onset of inferencing processes. Overall, these results suggest that autistic traits influence inferencing processes during narrative comprehension, albeit in different ways across modalities.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other