In recent years, a significant surge has occurred in the amount of children who are being diagnosed with a disorder on the autism spectrum. Current statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2011) show that 1 in 110 children in the United States have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and that the diagnosis of such is estimated to grow prodigiously due to a variety of different aspects, such as an ever-increasing broadening definition of autism, an inclusion of autism as a disability category under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990, improved diagnostic methods, and some other unknown factors (In Nickel's work as cited by Nickels in 2010). Also, because a lack of or weakness in communication skills is a common characteristic for students who have an ASD, receiving early intervention to increase communication is imperative for this population. In consideration of this premise, this study looks at whether using a blended, balanced mode of reading instruction, the Language Experience Approach (Stauffer, 1970; Van Allen, 1970) and the work of Patricia Oelwein (1995), through written means can improve oral language fluency output and syntactical structure concurrently for a student who has suffered from many of the symptoms of ASD, but has not been clinically diagnosed. Along with the collection of qualitative data aggregated throughout this study through observational means, quantitative data was also collected before, during, and after the intervention to measure the effects on the subject. Quantitative data was obtained from a Letter-Identification Assessment (Clay 2005), the QRI-5 (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011), the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1997) , and Mean Length of Utterance (MLU).; Results obtained from this study showed that the interventions had a positive effect on the subject in terms of listening, speaking, reading, and writing where the fluency and complexity of the subject's speech patterns and ability to read and write improved over the course of the intervention period.

Dans cette thèse, nous avons examiné chez des apprentis lecteurs le traitement de l'information latérale en lecture de mots isolés et le comportement oculomoteur en lecture de texte. Dans un premier groupe d'expériences, nous montrons que les apprentis lecteurs présentent une sensibilité à l'information latérale. Cette sensibilité dépend des caractéristiques de cette information (linguistique versus non linguistique) mais elle varie également selon le degré de difficulté associée au traitement de l'information centrale (mots fréquents versus mots peu fréquents). Le contrôle des ressources attentionnelles serait moins efficace chez les apprentis lecteurs que chez les lecteurs experts. Un deuxième groupe d'expériences met en évidence une amélioration de la capacité à traiter l'information latérale au cours de l'apprentissage de la lecture. Les résultats montrent également des différences qualitatives entre les lecteurs débutants et les lecteurs experts dans l'initiation des traitements lexicaux à partir de l'information parafovéale. Dans notre troisième groupe d'expériences, les résultats montrent qu'en lecture de texte, les apprentis lecteurs fixent plus longtemps les mots et les refixent également plus souvent que les lecteurs experts. Au fur et à mesure de l'apprentissage de la lecture, la taille des saccades s'accroît. De plus, les effets de la longueur des mots et de la fréquence sont plus importants chez les lecteurs de CE2 que chez les lecteurs de CM2 ou les lecteurs experts. Les différences développementales mises en évidence sont principalement liées à des facteurs cognitifs plutôt qu'à des facteurs oculomoteurs. / This thesis explore in beginning readers processing of lateral information in isolated reading task and eye movement in text reading. In a first serie of experiments, we show that beginning readers are sensitive to the lateral information. This sensitivity depends upon the difficulty of the central word that is under processing, but also upon the nature of the lateral information (linguistic versus non linguistic). Control of the visual attention could be less developped in beginning readers that in expert readers. In a second serie of experiments, our results indicate that increased reading skill goes hand in hand with the ability to extract more information from lateral vision. Differance are also evidenced between beginning readers and expert readers in the way initiation of the lexical processing from lateral information is achieve. In a third serie of experiments, results show that in text reading, beginning readers make shorter saccades, had higher fixation durations and higher refixation probabilities than in older or expert readers. Developmental differences that are evidenced are mainly linked to cognitive processes than oculomotor processes.