Study Determines Autistic Children’s Handwriting Problems Continue Through Teenage Years
A study recently conducted by Kennedy Krieger Researchers found that handwriting problems often affected those with autism into their teenage years. Published in the November 16, 2010 issue of Neurology, this research revealed that, like children with ASD, adolescents with ASD (ages 12 to 16) have poor handwriting quality and motor skill impairments when compared to typically developing peers. However, unlike younger children, perceptual reasoning was the main predictor of handwriting performance in adolescents. Perceptional reasoning is a person’s ability to reason through problems with nonverbal material.
The study author Amy Bastian, Ph.D., Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, focused on motor execution and perceptual reasoning as an important window into the neurobiological basis of autism. By looking at these various skills, researchers are able to study the basic brain systems important for learning and guiding actions, which has implications for all learned behavior, including complex communication and social skills.
“While adolescents with autism are more likely to have handwriting problems, there are several techniques available to improve handwriting quality, such as adjusting pencil grip, stabilizing the writing hand with the opposite hand or forming letters more slowly,” said Dr. Bastian. “Our research suggests that adolescents with autism may be able to learn and utilize compensatory strategies that involve reasoning skills to compensate for their motor impairments.”
Brian Field is the National Autism Examiner and co-founder of the Autism Support Network
