The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

Concept Imagery—the ability to create imaged gestalts—is a critical sensory component in language comprehension and analytical thinking. The technique of "Visualizing and Verbalizing" improves language comprehension and expression for individuals experiencing mild to severe weakness in comprehension, including those diagnosed with hyperlexia and/or autism. Language comprehension cannot be assumed. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) findings have shown particular deficiencies in higher-order reasoning skills, including those necessary for reading comprehension. “Reading instruction at all levels must be restructured to ensure that students learn to reason more effectively about what they have read,” states the report, which showed such a drastic and “baffling” decline in the reading comprehension performance of nine and seventeen-year-olds that the report was delayed for five months while researchers refigured the statistics and reexamined the test items.

Just as decoding skills are rooted in the sensory system, so are comprehension skills. There is compelling evidence that one of the primary sensory-cognitive skills basic to both oral and written language processing is imagery. Imagery has been linked to language processing, cognition, including critical thinking, creativity, and reading comprehension. There is very strong historical evidence regarding the role of imagery in cognition—a role that has been discussed since Aristotle. He stated, “It is impossible even to think without a mental picture.” Jean Piaget (1936, cited by Bleasdale 1983) wrote that over time, schemata become internalized in the form of imaged thought. Proceeding chronologically to examine some of the more interesting research and historical commentary, Arnheim (1966) wrote, “Thinking is concerned with the objects and events of the world we know…When the objects are not physically present, they are represented indirectly by what we remember and know about them. In what shape do memory and knowledge deliver the needed facts? In the shape of memory images, we answer most simply. Experiences deposit images.” Continuing in the sixties, Allan Paivio (1969), who has written extensively on imagery and cognition, stated, “As every psychologist knows, imagery once played a prominent role in the interpretation of associative meaning, mediation, and memory. It was widely regarded as the mental representative of meaning—or of concrete meaning at least.”

Despite the importance of imagery to cognition, there are individual differences in the ability to form mental images for language concepts. A significant percent of children and adults, of all ages and backgrounds, have difficulty imaging gestalts. Consequently, they process “parts” of the language they read or hear, often ask and re-ask questions from oral language, have difficulty following directions, or read and reread material from written language. These individuals suffer from a language comprehension dysfunction, which may be labeled hyperlexia and/or autism. If the sensory-cognitive skill of concept imagery—the ability to create an imaged gestalt (whole) of meaning from oral or written language—is not available, then good decoding skills or good oral vocabulary skills may not generalize to good language comprehension or the ability to develop higher order thinking skills.

Concept imagery is a critical factor in cognition, including language comprehension, language expression, and analytical thinking. Imaging is the sensory input that connects us to language we hear and language we read. We create an imaged gestalt (whole) from language concepts and from this whole we can do higher order thinking skills: get the main idea, make an inference, draw a conclusion, predict, and evaluate. In short, the imaged gestalt is the basis for language processing, for reasoning and creating. Einstein said, “If I can't picture it, I can't understand it.”

Individuals experiencing mild to severe weakness in language comprehension, including hyperlexia and autism, also experience weakness in the sensory-cognitive function of concept imagery. The individual differences in this ability to create mental representations for the whole is a primary contributing factor in the symptoms associated with hyperlexia and autism; however, research indicates that concept imagery can be developed through specific steps that integrate mental imagery with verbal processing.

Content Area: Sensory Processing