An eye movement based reading intervention in lexical and segmental readers with acquired dyslexia

Abstract

Due to their brain damage, aphasic patients with acquired dyslexia often rely to a greater extent on lexical or segmental reading procedures. Thus, therapy intervention is mostly targeted on the more impaired reading strategy. In the present work we introduce a novel therapy approach based on real-time measurement of patients' eye movements as they attempt to read words. More specifically, an eye movement contingent technique of stepwise letter de-masking was used to support sequential reading, whereas fixation-dependent initial masking of non-central letters stimulated a lexical (parallel) reading strategy. Four lexical and four segmental readers with acquired central dyslexia received our intensive reading intervention. All participants showed remarkable improvements as evident in reduced total reading time, a reduced number of fixations per word and improved reading accuracy. Both types of intervention led to item-specific training effects in all subjects. A generalisation to untrained items was only found in segmental readers after the lexical training. Eye movement analyses were also used to compare word processing before and after therapy, indicating that all patients, with one exclusion, maintained their preferred reading strategy. However, in several cases the balance between sequential and lexical processing became less extreme, indicating a more effective individual interplay of both word processing routes.

Early Brain Sensitivity to Word Frequency and Lexicality During Reading Aloud and Implicit Reading

“…Thus, the assumption here was that prolonged gaze durations and higher fixation counts for words are taken to reflect sublexical decoding-based processes. In contrast, single fixations and shorter gaze durations, expected for the easiest items (i.e., familiar visual words), are suggestive of lexical reading via direct orthographic whole-word recognition (Hawelka et al., 2010; Schattka et al., 2010; Ablinger et al., 2014). For the present study, the selected PW received a significantly higher number of fixations and longer gaze durations ( M ± SD = 3.26 ± 1.02 and 877 ms ± 253) than the selected LFW ( M ± SD = 2.48 ± 0.52 and 610 ms ± 130) and those with HFW ( M ± SD = 1.79 ± 0.31 and 422 ms ± 66), with stimulus length controlled; all differences between conditions were highly significant ( p < 0.001).…”

Effects of word frequency and contextual predictability on sentence reading in aphasia: an eye movement analysis

“…The analyses of eye movements have recently also been applied to the diagnosis and treatment of reading impairment after brain damage, such as acquired central dyslexia (Ablinger, von Heyden, et al, 2014;Kim & Lemke, 2016;Schattka, Radach, & Huber, 2010) 1 . There is also an emerging interest in using eye tracking to examine silent reading and sentence/text comprehension in aphasia (Chesneau, Joanette, & Ska, 2007;Kim & Bolger, 2012;Knilans & DeDe, 2015).…”

Task-Related Differences in Eye Movements in Individuals With Aphasia

“…For persons with neurological damage, the interaction between oculomotor and cognitive systems can be impaired, resulting in eye movements that are reflective of the underlying damage. Little work to date has characterized the oculomotor function of individuals with aphasia (but see Ablinger et al, 2014a,b; Kim and Lemke, 2016), a language disorder that is often caused by brain damage due to a stroke. The current study sought to investigate oculomotor control in individuals with aphasia over a range of circumstances.…”

“…There is a growing body of work that uses eye tracking to investigate language processing (Dickey et al, 2007; Yee et al, 2008; Thompson and Choy, 2009; Cho and Thompson, 2010; Schattka et al, 2010; Mirman et al, 2011; Meyer et al, 2012; Mack et al, 2013; Hanne et al, 2015; Kim and Lemke, 2016), attention (Heuer and Hallowell, 2015), working memory (Ivanova and Hallowell, 2012), and reading (e.g., Ablinger et al, 2014a) in PWA. Some of these studies have demonstrated the feasibility and validity of using eye movements to measure linguistic (e.g., Ablinger et al, 2014b) and non-linguistic cognitive processing (Ivanova and Hallowell, 2012; Heuer and Hallowell, 2015), as well as outcomes related to treatment (e.g., Kim and Lemke, 2016). Other studies have examined specific aspects of sentence processing in individuals with aphasia (e.g., Mack et al, 2013; Hanne et al, 2015), or distinct processing patterns in both behavioral and eye movement data between PWA and control participants (e.g., Dickey et al, 2007).…”