Error analysis of oral paragraph reading in individuals with aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background: Acquired reading impairments that commonly occur in individuals with aphasia can significantly impact their quality of life. Few studies have examined errors during oral connected text reading and the relationship of errors to reading comprehension, which is significant since readers rarely encounter reading material presented as single words in everyday situations.

Aims: This preliminary study aimed to characterize the errors made by persons with aphasia during oral paragraph reading relative to neurotypical peers, examine the association between reading error frequency and aphasia severity, oral and silent reading comprehension, and extent of motor speech deficits, and examine the relationship between oral and silent reading comprehension performance of persons with aphasia.

Methods and procedures: Eight persons with aphasia (three with anomic, four with Broca’s, one with conduction) and eight age- and education-matched neurotypical participants orally read paragraphs from the Gray Oral Reading Tests, Fifth Edition, and answered associated comprehension questions. The Western Aphasia Battery – Revised, Reading Comprehension Battery for Aphasia – Second Edition, and Apraxia of Speech Rating Scale provided measures of aphasia severity, silent reading comprehension, and extent of motor speech impairment for persons with aphasia. Reading samples were descriptively analyzed for error frequency and type. Two-tailed Spearman’s correlations were used to examine the relationship between total error frequency, aphasia severity, oral and silent reading comprehension, and extent of motor speech deficit.

Outcomes and results: Persons with aphasia made significantly more errors relative to participants without aphasia. Of persons with aphasia, individuals with anomic aphasia produced the fewest errors with the least amount of variance relative to persons with Broca’s and conduction aphasia. Persons with anomic aphasia made more morphological errors and self-corrections relative to other errors. Persons with Broca’s aphasia made a high number of articulation errors, fillers, and self-corrections, while the person with conduction aphasia made more visual-phonological and visual-semantic errors relative to other persons with aphasia. Moderate to strong associations were found between total error frequency, aphasia severity, oral reading comprehension, and extent of motor speech deficit when articulation errors were included in the total error frequency.

Conclusions: Although preliminary, the results suggest analysis of reading errors and comprehension of oral paragraph reading can provide a more detailed account of reading and language processing deficits of persons with aphasia, and supports the use of oral reading as a measure of speech production impairment. Future research will need to examine a larger sample of participants to appreciate the clinical and theoretical implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• oral reading
• reading errors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of South Alabama Faculty Development Council grant.