Vocabulary and language processing demands affect the performance of children with autism on tasks of verbal memory and story retelling. Results are viewed within a connectionist framework of verbal working memory.

This research examined phonological awareness (PA) and single word reading in 14 school-age children with autism and 10 age-matched, typically developing (TD) children between 5-7 years. Two measures of PA, an elision task (ELI) and a sound blending task (BLW), were given along with two measures of single word reading, word identification for real words (WID) and phonetic decoding of nonwords (WATTK). Group differences were found for performance on PA tasks but no group differences were found for WID or WATTK. All the children with autism scored within the average range on WID and WATTK, although a statistical bias was noted for WID. No relationship was found between PA and measures of word reading in children with autism. Children with autism have adequate ability in single word reading but below average PA. Word reading does not appear to be related to PA for some of the children with autism ), systematic data concerning the development of phonological awareness and its relationship to word recognition in children with autism are lacking. The existing literature on reading ability in children with autism contains two viewpoints that suggest that the children may develop and understand the phonemic structure of words, despite having significant language and communication deficits frequently associated with autism. The first is that many children with autism show an unusual preoccupation with letters and print, frequently developing precocious reading ability for age despite a lack of formal training, a characteristic referred to as hyperlexia (Aaron, Frantz, & Manges, 1990;Nation, 1999). Children with hyperlexia have superior word recognition ability, including phonetic decoding skill, in advance of reading comprehension and cognitive ability. The precocious word reading and phonetic decoding ability suggests that children who are hyperlexic use some underlying knowledge of lettersound correspondence in order to quickly recognize or sound out words. However, not all children with autism show this unusual, early preoccupation with print and word recognition and are not considered to be hyperlexic

Recent research has acknowledged the importance of morphological awareness, beyond phonological awareness, to literacy achievement in both reading and writing for children, adolescents, and adults. Morphological awareness is the ability to recognize, reflect on, and manipulate the sublexical structure of words-the roots, prefixes, and suffixes. In this paper, we examine the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) to identify explicit gradespecific morphological awareness standards. We then discuss the standards-by-grade within the framework of learning morphology type and morphological aspects, for example, semantic, syntactic, and productive properties. Finally, we discuss the role of speech-language pathologists in collaboration with classroom teachers to support students with speech-language impairment and ELLs to achieve standards in the area of morphology.