Meta-analysis of emergent literacy in autism (Willems et al., 2025)

Purpose: Autistic individuals often exhibit poorer emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness, print knowledge, oral language) relative to their non-autistic peers. Although emergent literacy skills are known to impact future reading success in typical development, their relationship with word recognition and reading comprehension in autistic children remains unclear. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to identify the correlation between emergent literacy skills and reading abilities (i.e., word recognition and reading comprehension) in young autistic children.

Method: Fourteen correlational studies, including 837 autistic children ranging in age from 28 to 109 months, met the inclusion criteria. Robust variance estimation was used to compute an average weighted effect size, and possible moderator variables were also explored.

Results: Results indicated a significant, positive correlation between emergent literacy skills and reading abilities. Moderator analyses indicated that the correlations between emergent literacy and reading ability did not differ based on the type of reading ability (i.e., word recognition vs. reading comprehension) or emergent literacy skill (i.e., code- vs. meaning-based skills). However, IQ was a marginally significant moderator, and the relation between emergent literacy and reading ability was stronger in studies with participants with lower average IQ scores.

Conclusions: These findings have important implications for research and practice for young autistic children. There is a need for educators and other practitioners to (a) assess emergent literacy skills in early childhood to better identify autistic children who are at risk for reading difficulties and (b) actively promote and teach emergent literacy skills in young autistic children, as these skills are related to more advanced reading abilities.

Supplemental Material S1. PRISMA Checklist: The PRISMA 2020 statement comprised of 27-items addressing the introduction, methods, results and discussion sections of a systematic review report.

Supplemental Material S2. Search terms: Full list of search terms used across all four databases.

Supplemental Material S3. Emergent literacy and reading measures: Full list of the assessments used in each included study.

Supplemental Material S4. Forest plot: Forest plot of correlational data to provide a visual of the summarized information from each study individually.

Willems, K., Loveall, S. J., Goodrich, J. M., & Lang, D. (2025). Correlation between emergent literacy skills and reading abilities in young autistic children: A meta-analysis. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00108