Thursday, April 3, 2025
4/3/2025
Assessment of real-time reading comprehension in bilinguals with aphasia - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Reading comprehension is supported by a hierarchy of cognitive-linguistic processes such as recognizing words, mapping semantics onto words and phrases, and integrating information across units. In bilingual individuals, successful reading comprehension must also include some mechanism of language selection to enable reading in the target language given that both languages are active during linguistic processing. Due to stroke, bilinguals with aphasia (BWA) routinely demonstrate impairments in reading comprehension and language selection—in addition to other cognitive-linguistic deficits—which may severely compromise their ability to access and select appropriate lexical representations in one or both languages while reading. Previous studies in healthy bilinguals have used eye-tracking-while-reading to determine the effect of contextual information on real-time sentence comprehension; however, it is currently unknown whether BWA are sensitive to the same types of information or whether they demonstrate similar patterns of language co-activation post-stroke. The overall goal of this proposal is to address this gap in the literature through a series of eye-tracking- while-reading experiments to measure the effects of semantic and lexical variables on real-time sentence processing in BWA. Eye-tracking-while-reading designs are ideal for examining real-time reading because they permit subjects to i) view all words in a sentence throughout the trial (i.e., without pressing a button to uncover them) and ii) return to earlier words or phrases for rereading which is especially important for BWA who will require more time to retrieve lexical representations and process the meaning of a sentence. In the current proposal, Aim 1 will examine the effects of reading cognates, which share overlapping orthographic and semantic representations (e.g., piano in English and Spanish), and semantically constrained sentences on real-time sentence processing. Aim 2 will examine the effects of reading interlingual homograph words, which overlap in orthography but diverge in meaning (e.g., fin, animal part in English, end in Spanish), and semantically constrained sentences on real-time sentence processing. Aim 3 will examine the relationship between eye tracking outcomes and offline measures of language proficiency, linguistic impairment, and nonlinguistic cognition to investigate the effects of individual variability in BWA reading behaviors post-stroke. By achieving these aims, this project will advance our understanding of reading comprehension impairment in BWA. Ultimately, such findings can be used to enhance clinical outcomes for this population and will represent an important first step in improving quality of life and access to literacy post-stroke.
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