Multiple Oral Re-reading treatment for alexia: The parts may be greater than the whole

Abstract

This study examines the reasons for the success of Multiple Oral Re-reading (MOR; Moyer, 1979), a non-invasive, easily administered alexia treatment that has been reported in the literature and is currently in clinical use. The treatment consists of reading text passages aloud multiple times a day. Findings that MOR improves reading speed on practised as well as novel text have been inconsistent, making MOR's role in the rehabilitation of alexia unclear. We hypothesised that MOR's treatment mechanism works through repetition of high frequency words (i.e., bottom-up processing). We designed and controlled our text passages to test the hypothesis that participants would not improve on all novel text but would improve on text that includes a critical mass of the words contained in the passages they were re-reading. We further hypothesised that the improvement would be at the level of their specific alexic deficit. We tested four participants with phonological alexia and two with pure alexia during 8 weeks of MOR treatment. Contrary to the conclusions of previous studies, our results indicate that improvements in top-down processing cannot explain generalisation in MOR and that much of the improvement in reading is through repetition of the practised words. However, most patients also showed improvement when specific phrases were re-used in novel passages, indicating that practice of difficult words in context may be crucial to reading improvement.

Keywords:

• Alexia
• Aphasia
• Reading
• Treatment

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by NIH grant R01 HD036019. We would like to thank the many people involved in making this project a reality: Robyn Oliver, Laurie Glezer, Kim Wittenberg, Leah Orchinik, Elizabeth Christy, and Sean Rogers.

Anne Sperling contributed to this research as part of a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgetown University Medical Center. No official support or endorsement by the National Institute of Mental Health is intended or should be inferred.