In their book The Mosaic of Thought (1997) Keene and Zimmerman identified six“cueing systems” which they described as the channels or sources through which the brain receives information during reading:

• grapho-phonic cuing–the identification of letters and sounds
• lexical or orthographic cuing–the identification of sight words
• syntactic cuing–the recognition of the form and structure of language
• schematic cuing–prior knowledge or association
• pragmatic cuing–the purposes and needs of the reader
• semantic cuing–the meaning of the text

The authors identify a sample semantic cuing problem:  reading words fluently but experiencing difficulty defining what is meant by a word, sentence, or text. (p. 203)

This is precisely where we often find our kids with autism (and always those with hyperlexia) stuck in their comprehension.  And this is where (with due credit to the study done by O’Connor and Klein, 2004) we find anaphoric cuing (also spelled cueing) as a useful semantic cuing tool to help get them unstuck. 

See Autism and hyperlexia, Part 1, http://readerswithautism.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=256 .

Comprehension problems are not unique to kids on the autism spectrum, and some practical hints on how to use anaphoric cuing can be gleaned from the literature on reading comprehension generally.

As Cris Tovani notes in her book I Read But I Don’t Get It (2000), good readers ask themselves clarifying questions as they read.  Who, what, when, where, and why questions about characters, setting, or events.  (p. 52)  Asking themselves these clarifying questions focuses the reader on meaning, not simply on decoding, word by word.

But if the child with autism or hyperlexia has lost the meaning of what they’re reading, how do they know what questions to ask themselves? 

There is the beauty of the anaphoric cuing technique.

With a fairly short list of anaphora (words that refer to other words) that can be listed on a bookmark  we can teach them when to stop in their reading and what to ask themselves before they move on.

When we read:

he, she, they, we, I, you

we ask who?

When we read:

hers, his, its, theirs, ours, yours

we ask whose?

When we read:

it, that, this, can, do

we ask what?

When we read:

here, there, come, go

we ask where?

When we read:

then, before, after

we ask when? 

By learning a list of specific words and answering a few related questions, many kids can make significant improvement in their comprehension of text, particularly narrative fiction, which often is the most difficult for a child with autism to comprehend.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 2: Helping Bobby read