Abstract
A survey was designed to explore the interrelationship of visual processing ability, levels of character reading and writing, and behavioral characteristecs of autistic children, using non-autistic subnormal children as a reference group. The fifty-two subjects, whose CAs ranged from 81 to 149 months with a median of 115 months, all attend special classes of elementary schools or special schools at the elementary level. Behavioral characteristics were evaluated by teachers of each child, using 35 items which were constructed from Wing's "A scheme for clinical description and diagnosis." Subjects were divided into an autistic group (N=26) and a non-autistic subnormal group (N=26) by doctor clinical diagnoses. The result of Frostig's developmental test of visual perception showed the inferiority of the autistic group to the nonautistic group in every sub-test, espcially "position in space." As for the 35 items from Wing's scheme, the number of checks in the autistic group was significantly greater than that in the non-autistic, and frequency differences were especially high in items such as "inappropriate emotional reactions," "socially immature and difficult behavior," and "abnormal responses to sensory experiences." Of all the correlations between items, rates were quite high for reading and writing level (φ=0.923) and "position in space" and "figure-ground" (φ= 0.808) . Finally, these items were factor analysed, yielding such factors as "linguistic problems associated with autism," "visual processing ability associated with reading and writting," and "sensory problems associated with autism."
