TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of lexical variables on silent reading comprehension in individuals with aphasia
T2 - Evidence from eye tracking
AU - DeDe, Gayle
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank the participants for their assistance with this study. I would also like to thank Jessica Knilans, Sam Deitering, and other members of the Speech, Language and Brain lab at the University of Arizona for their help with data collection. This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under Grant K23DC010808.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
PY - 2017/9
Y1 - 2017/9
N2 - Purpose: Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length. Methods: IWA and control participants without brain damage participated in the experiment. Participants read sentences while a camera tracked their eye movements. Results: IWA showed effects of word class, word length, and word frequency that were similar to or greater than those observed in controls. Conclusions: IWA showed sensitivity to lexical variables on the first pass through the sentence. The results are consistent with the view that IWA focus on lexical access on their first pass through a sentence and then work to build syntactic structure on subsequent passes. In addition, IWA showed very long rereading times and low skipping rates overall, which may contribute to some of the group differences in reading comprehension.
AB - Purpose: Previous eye-tracking research has suggested that individuals with aphasia (IWA) do not assign syntactic structure on their first pass through a sentence during silent reading comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the time course with which lexical variables affect silent reading comprehension in IWA. Three lexical variables were investigated: word frequency, word class, and word length. Methods: IWA and control participants without brain damage participated in the experiment. Participants read sentences while a camera tracked their eye movements. Results: IWA showed effects of word class, word length, and word frequency that were similar to or greater than those observed in controls. Conclusions: IWA showed sensitivity to lexical variables on the first pass through the sentence. The results are consistent with the view that IWA focus on lexical access on their first pass through a sentence and then work to build syntactic structure on subsequent passes. In addition, IWA showed very long rereading times and low skipping rates overall, which may contribute to some of the group differences in reading comprehension.
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U2 - 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-16-0045
DO - 10.1044/2017_JSLHR-L-16-0045
M3 - Article
C2 - 28863409
AN - SCOPUS:85029773140
SN - 1092-4388
VL - 60
SP - 2589
EP - 2602
JO - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
JF - Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
IS - 9
ER -