Reading Comprehension

Post Reply New Topic

Is it possible to have Aspergers AND good reading comprehension?

I ask because looking back at test scores from my childhood, it appears as though I have great reading comprehension (high scores), but reading on here, that doesn't seem to be a common trend.

I will say that I feel like I struggle greatly to understand some things that I read, especially when they are more scholarly or uninteresting to me, but looking at how my responses to the reading are scored, you wouldn't be able to tell.

I had very poor reading comprehension during elementary and junior high school.

When I was growing up, I never enjoyed reading for reading sake. I only associated reading with schoolwork. The only exception to the rule was comic books. But when I entered high school, the requirement to read efficiently became extremely important. My school must have recognized my limitation and placed me in a strange type of special class during my freshman high school year. The training was a type of reading comprehension training. The closest I could describe this approach was a class in Speed Reading. They would flash a paragraph or two of information for a very brief period of time and then measure my comprehension. They tried to teach me tricks on absorbing written material quickly and effectively.

My ability to learn was hindered by my lack of short-term memory. I would read the first sentence of a paragraph and then I would read the next. But by the time I finished the second sentence I forgot what the first sentence was about; so I would reread it. Then off to the third sentence but part way through that I forgot what the first two sentences were about, so I reread them. So it might take me an hour to read one paragraph - a single paragraph. What speed- reading taught me is to quickly identify one or two key words in a paragraph. This was the essence of the paragraph. Once I found them, they would anchor the entire paragraph around those couple words. So instead of reading linearly, I would read information from the inside out. I learned to comprehend meaning by drilling down from those key words to frame the entire paragraph.

So essentially I read from the inside out.

I had good reading comprehension in school. In grade school there were three students, including me, that went to the upper glass grade for our reading hour to read with the older kids.

I think I have ADHD because reading for me as an adult is difficult. My mind wanders too much and I often have to reread sections multiple times. I'm also a relatively slow reader because every single word I read or write is sounded out in my mind; the words are narrated in my mind. I can't read any other way. So, just as I wouldn't be able to sustain listening to someone talking very rapidly, I can't speed read or even read quickly.

Reading is practically the only thing I'm good at. It served me well when I was at uni and had to read 50+ articles for each assignment. Uni killed reading for pleasure for a long time, though. I'm only now starting to read books again.

I've thought about proofreading as a freelancer.

Luke Jackson [in The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome by Tony Attwood] described a trick he used to learn how to read proficiently. The trick was to read the material aloud. Most normal people learn to read silently whereas an Aspie learns to read by reading aloud. Attwood theorized that, “Saying what you are reading can facilitate comprehension.” I believe this to be true. Many times even today when I am reading something that I really want to understand and to remember, I will either read it aloud or read it silently just moving my lips.

I don't really understand why people describe the environment in such specific details in novels. It always amazes me.
Sounds like super human capability to me. I don't really notice what is around me.

This is the reason I don't like fiction in written form but comic books are cool.

Pure written stuff what I tend to like are articles about various stuff incl. science. I excel at that.

I think I have good reading comprehension, however... I work in a school, and am often confronted with comprehension questions. Sometimes others think an answer is immediately obvious, whereas I believe there to be a variety of possibilities, or think it's ambiguous. This doesn't just happen in reading but in maths too. Although I'm not great at maths.

I would think those of us who think verbally would have good reading comprehension.

That is not me, I struggled. There are several reasons someone with ASD could have poor reading comprehension like poor working memory, co-morbid dyslexia. If I'm reading something that paints a picture in my head, I can get it. If it's new or abstract, I can't follow.

You must have made a typing error. You probably meant to say "Is it possible to have aspergers and NOT have good reading comprehension?". That IS the stereotype after all. That all aspies are scholarly Sheldon Leonard types.

The answer is yes. There are all kinds of aspies and some are not good at reading comprehension.

Oh!
Im sorry!

You actually meant it the way you said it.

Well...my answer is the same. you're one of the aspies that has bad reading comprehension. Others have good.

I don't know if other aspies have good reading comprehension but you certainly aren't one of those who have it good - when I read the thread, in which you tried to convince me that I had written that dinosaurs and the cavemen lived in one and the same time period (although I NEVER wrote anything like that, I just wrote I would like to vivit those two separate time periods), I thought my eyes were going to jump out of my face out of astonishment.

I have bad reading comprehension. It used to be good at school but at work and university it sucked. I didn't know what was wrong with me and would read the same thing over and over again.

I loved to read as a kid. I loved learning from what I read. But when I entered my early adult years I started to find it a chore, along with many other things.

Reading books is not something I enjoy. I only read information. If I read school work and the subject is boring I can happen to read a whole page without actually reading it - if that makes sense. I just wander away with my thoughts and keep on reading. If I read a magazine I normally start from the other end of it. My wife always ask me why I do that and I can't answer why, it just feels better.

If there's a large thread on a forum I normally read page one and then the last page going backwards. I hate quotes because they leave me wondering what happened in the conversation - which I would have found out if I had read the whole thing in the right order.

I also often skip steps in instructions and miss out on some big detail. Search for help or look in an instruction book for an answer is limited to a couple of seconds. After that I move on trying to solve the problem on my own.

No.
YOU demonstrated bad reading comprehension.

Because I never SAID that ..you said ...any such thing!

I was pointing your sloppy writing, and was agreeing with Krafty that the way you stated it was ambiguous, and you left the reader unsure whether or not you were talking about the cave man era and the dinosaur era as being the same era.

Which is why I said "I hope you are aware that they are not the same era". I did not say "you're a dumbcluck who thinks that they are they were the same era."

OK then, it was a misunderstanding.