[Investigation of reading abilities of ischemic stroke patients with aphasia].

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Reading is a part of the language processes; a strong interaction can be found between them so the damage of the one has a strong impact on the other. It is worth to put emphasis on the exploration of reading disorders which occur with aphasia to have a better outcome of the rehabilitation process. The aim of our study is to explore the main characteristics of aqcuired reading disorders to have a more specialized and individualized language therapy.

METHODS

19 ischemic stroke patients with aphasia took part in our study. All participants were right-handed with a lesion of left arteria cerebri media infarct. Due to the Hungarian version of Western Aphasia Battery 10 mild and 9 moderate participated. Reading abilities were investigated with our reading battery which consisted four main tasks: grapheme-phoneme correspondence, reading words, lexical access and reading comprehension. Tobii X120 device was used for recording and analyzing patients' eye-movements.

RESULTS

Significant positive correlations were found between the four subscales of Western Aphasia Battery and some part of the reading tasks. Eye-movements were analyzed, especially fixation count and total fixation duration. The severity of language disorder had a strong impact on fixation count and fixation duration. The more serious the language disorder was the more eye movements were detected.

CONCLUSION

Our data support the idea that the severity of aphasia had a strong impact on reading processes and eye-movements. Eye-tracking device can help to have a deeper insight in the background brain mechanisms during reading. Our results contribute to have a more accurate diagnostic process to have a more specialized language therapy with better outcome.