No evidence for high inflexible precision of prediction errors in autism during lexical processing.

Research has shown that information processing differences associated with autism could impact on language and literacy development. This study tested an approach to autistic cognition that suggests learning occurs via prediction errors, and autistic people have very precise and inflexible predictions that result in more sensitivity to meaningless signal errors than non‐autistic readers. We used this theoretical background to investigate whether differences in prediction coding influence how orthographic (Experiment 1) and semantic information (Experiment 2) is processed by autistic readers. Experiment 1 used a lexical decision task to test whether letter position information was processed less flexibly by autistic than non‐autistic readers. Three types of letter strings: words, transposed letter and substituted letters nonwords were presented. Experiment 2 used a semantic relatedness task to test whether autistic readers processed words with high and low semantic diversity differently to non‐autistic readers. Results showed similar transposed letter and semantic diversity effects for all readers; indicating that orthographic and semantic information are processed similarly by autistic and non‐autistic readers; and therefore, differences in prediction coding were not evident for these lexical processing tasks. Lay Summary: Many autistic people experience difficulties with reading. This study examined whether this might be related to how autistic people process words. Specifically, this research examined whether autistic adults process how letters are positioned and the meaning of words differently to non‐autistic people. No differences in word processing were found between autistic and non‐autistic people. This suggests that if an autistic adult does experience reading difficulties, it is unlikely to be related to differences in word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]