Article

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.

Langue : ANGLAIS