Perceptual span in individuals with aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background: Perceptual span refers to the field of effective vision during reading comprehension. It is determined by many factors, including reading proficiency. No studies have investigated the perceptual span in people with reading comprehension impairments due to aphasia.

Aims: The present study examined whether perceptual span is smaller in individuals with aphasia than controls.

Methods and Procedures: The task was a gaze-contingent moving windows paradigm during silent reading using an eye tracker. Data from 11 individuals with aphasia and 15 neurotypical controls were analyzed.

Outcomes and Results: Perceptual span in individuals with aphasia was the fixated word plus one word to the right of fixation, whereas perceptual span in controls was the fixated word plus two words to the right of fixation.

Conclusion: Individuals with aphasia have a smaller perceptual span than controls, which likely reflects increased effort during reading comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Perceptual span
• aphasia
• reading comprehension
• eye tracking
• sentence comprehension

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants for their assistance with this study. I would also like to thank members of the Speech, Language and Brain lab at the University of Arizona and Temple University for their help with data collection. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jinmian Yang and Keith Rayner. Their advice and guidance during the planning of this project were invaluable. This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under grant K23DC010808.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some studies have used self-paced reading to examine reading comprehension in individuals with aphasia. Here, we focus on studies that use eye tracking because of work suggesting that the two methods may not provide consistent patterns of results (e.g., DeDe, 2013; Knilans & DeDe, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [K23DC010808].