Inference is something that is throughout every story that we read. Even through expository stories we have to make these jumps, and because it’s not a direct kind of language, you know autism is a disorder of functional connectivity. So if I was to look at your brain, your whole brain would be lit up because your visual cortex would be reading the words — your language centers would be taking care of all that, and then any kinds of memories that that story brings up in you is also really lit. So you’re on fire when you’re reading. However, for children with autism you see a more direct kind of thing.
You see a lot of activity in that visual cortex and maybe a little bit in the language centers but much less in the environmental, kind of situational things that show those connections. So when it comes to inference we’re not talking about very literal, very straightforward language. We’re talking about getting information from a story and making predictions, or making assumptions on what we’ve read — but it’s not directly there, you know. It’s not, “William has a red sweater,” it’s like, “William looked outside and the skies were gray. He had a baseball game. I wonder what he’s going to do.” And you have to infer that that’s rainy.
One of the things we do intervention-wise, because children can infer when things are presented verbally and have a much more difficult time when things are presented auditorily — we start, separate from the story, where they are.
Perhaps we have a baby with shampoo in their hair and they’re crying and that kind of stuff. And we look, “What do we know, from just looking at the picture?” “Oh, the baby is crying, the baby has soap on its hair.” And then, “What do we know from our head? What do we know just from our head, not what we saw in the picture?”
“Oh, soap can sometimes get in your eyes, and soap can make you cry because it stings.” And so, “Then what’s our inference?” “The baby may be crying because the soap is stinging their eyes.” You give them an idea to do that on just a visual basis with a picture, and then you pull it to your text comprehension — so they can do that same order in what they’re reading and see they can take part, which is similar to a question where part comes from the story and part comes from their head. They can take those and put them together and make an inference.
