[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.