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In graduate school, Emily Coderre, Ph.D., was fascinated by how the brain manages language in bilingual speakers. Her doctoral work considered language processing and executive control. As a postdoc, her focus shifted to how language processing differs in autistic and non-autistic individuals.

“There are claims that autistic people have difficulties with language, particularly reading comprehension and understanding stories,” said Coderre.

But her latest findings show this is not the case.

“What I found in my research is that it’s, first of all, not universal,” said Coderre. “Many autistic people don't have any problems with language.”

“And second of all,” adds Coderre, “it's much more complicated than the research makes it sound.”

There is some evidence that there is little difference in difficulty between understanding a story or understanding the meaning of a picture, said Coderre. While she acknowledges that some autistic people may have visual learning styles and think in pictures, she cautions against extending that assumption to all autistic people. Doing so, she says, “perpetuates the idea that any sort of visual stimulus will be easier to understand than language.”  

“There are a lot of similarities between understanding stories told through pictures, and stories told through language,” said Coderre. “So why should it be easier in one modality?”

To learn more, Coderre collaborated with a colleague to study how people understand stories when they're told through comic strip pictures. Using electroencephalography (EEG), an imaging technique that records neural activity through the scalp, they took a more nuanced look at what's going on in the brain during the activity than behavioral responses alone could offer.

The results? Coderre’s research reveals that understanding a story relies on the same core processes, whether through pictures or language.

“So that suggests that language is not special,” said Coderre. “It's not the presence of language throwing things off. It's understanding a story in the first place.”

“If you think about what goes into understanding a story, it's complicated,” said Coderre. “You need memory and perspective-taking and the ability to fill in gaps and make inferences about what's happening, why people are doing what they are doing. It's becoming a point of view.”

“I'm slowly trying to chip away at the idea that visual images are easier to understand;  because it's kind of alarming actually, and a lot of educational resources and interventions, particularly in the autism field, rely on pictures because it's just assumed that pictures are easy, and language is hard,” said Coderre.

“My research is finding, at least at the level of stories, a slightly different picture.”

Emily Coderre, Ph.D., received a $694,157 Department of Defense Autism Research Program Early Career Development Award for the project "Dismantling the 'Visual Ease Assumption': Cross-modal Examinations of  Narrative Comprehension in Individuals with Autism." Coderre also received a $249,978 Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute Engagement Award for Capacity Building for the project "Increasing Capacity for Autism Research in a Rural State: Co-Creation of Engagement Tools."