AS and understanding the meaning of words

[Tiggiwinkle]

DS5 has AS-he is 8. He can read fluently. Up till now, he has only shown interest in reading non-fiction and has had no problems understanding what he is reading. However, seeing his older bother reading the new HP book he decided to start reading the Harry Potter series. I am astounded at how little he can actually understand. AS I said, he reads perfectly-no word is too difficult. But he does not know what they mean. As he is pretty rigid and has obsessional tendencies with his AS, he insists on understanding a word before continuing with the sentence, thus not giving himself the chance to work things out through context. Consequently he is reading with a dictionary and laboriously looking everything up-or asking us the meanings. This is not helping to keep him interested in the story. He point blank refuses to let me read to him as he must do it himslelf. Anyone else experience this or have any ideas to help?

Anyone?

tiggiwinkle, i was like this as a child and still am somewhat now.
when i was a child i couldnt carry on with a story until i understood what every word meant as there was no point to reading the story otherwise, i would drive my mum mad and she bought me a dictionary, today if i am reading something that i dont understand, i will stop reading and look the word up on the internet so it takes me a long time to read a book!!!! but i couldnt even now attempt to read a HP book, it is full of too many descriptions and thats too much for me, i tend to stick to easy not too descriptive books now.
HTH

sorry, meant to add, i WANTED to know all the big words and learn, its extremely important for us aspies to do everything 100% correctly and i wonder if this is why your DS is being so rigid in his reading.

DS1 does this to an extent (he cant read at 7.5, but with conversation). Its words that have double / implied meanings etc- semantic pragmatic disorder. generally he ahs exceptional language abilities (was alst scored 16 - 21 years level by SALT) until he hits this block.

What we are doing is keeping a scrapbook with lots of words and phrases in that we meet and their meanings, so that he can refer easily. Quite often with AS its not the words as such, rather than the usgae of that word so that may be why he isn't using context- the example given by many is 'its raining cats and dogs' which certainly DS1 takes literally but really its mroe complex than that. Also there isn't any real flexibility, so a phrase genrally used in one contaxt can't often be imported into another.

Just as an example fo why he can't progress- I have AS traits (probably could get a DX if Is o wanted), as does my mother. Neiother of us can enter a restaurant / shop / eat from a menu if there is a spelling mistake o0n it- the good pub back home had 'vegitarian' on the sign and as a result we didnt go there. The chap at BIBIC told me off and said I was discriminating against dyslexic chefs but its not that at all, its just a ocmplete mental barrier to me that nobody else can see (bar Mum) or understand. Its silly, but its there nonetheless. Dh ahs adjusted to it now 9and will justa sk the restaurant to change the spelling LOl after which i will go in).
perhaps it is the same barrier for your ds when he cannot understand a phrase?

Clearly it doesnt reflect in my typing but may explain why even when i have my glasses i dont preview my posts- hmm, I wonder.......

Jenk-that is the way DS is exactly, not only with reading but everything else! It has to be right. I just dont know how to help really because as you say the HP books are full of the phrases that he cannot understand.
Peachy-it is interesting about the menu thing-DS would be very upset if something was spelt wrongly too.
I am in the same boat btw-I have lots of traits, but I guess thats to be exptected-Of my 5 DSs I have two DSs dx with AS and two older ones who almost certainly have AS but not dx. It has to come from somewhere
Ds5 was assessed by a speech therapist who found some problems with semantics, but I had no idea how much these were affecting him until now. Like your DS in language DS5 is very advanced.

I haven't had this myself to such an extent, but I think that's partly due to the fact that as a child I read a lot of old stories, children's classics like "What Katy Did" more adult ones like "The Tell Tale Heart" and also I loved reading old descriptions of things that were written when the letters and words were rather different, eg no J, an S that looked like an F, lots of "thou" and different spellings and so forth and so I think I always accepted there might be words I wouldn't understand. Though I'd have to sit and work out a translation if it was really unfamiliar.
But I do still get caught up with wanting to use the precise meaning of words. So I'll distinguish between "can" and "may", "should" and "must", "could" and "would".