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A new study leads to new understanding of how stroke impacts reading

It’s long been known that people who experience a stroke can struggle with reading, but researchers weren’t clear exactly why. Now, a new study, led by researchers at Georgetown University, reveals that strokes can limit a person’s ability to use the meaning of words to help them recognize the words when reading.
The finding presents a possible opportunity for new therapeutic strategies to help people recover one of the most important life skills. Researchers looked at scanned images of brains damaged by stroke while study participants read aloud. They were then able to pinpoint a part of the brain and related connections that affect how deciphering the meanings of words facilitates reading. They determined that the reason some stroke survivors can’t use meanings of words to read is because they can’t map the words they are trying to pronounce back to the ideas behind the words.
The researchers also mapped the extent of the strokes with MRI imaging. The images revealed that damage along the superior temporal sulcus, a brain region that plays a crucial role in speech processing and auditory , reduced the advantage of being able to read high imageability over low imageability words, reflecting an inability to use meaning to support reading.They also found an overlapping brain region that was related to impairments in connecting meanings of words to their sounds, or phonology. Together, these results demonstrate that some reading deficits occur in left-hemisphere stroke survivors as a result of an impaired integration of meaning and phonology.
These findings clarify the neurobiology of reading and provide the strongest evidence to date for a form of reading disorder that can occur after a left hemisphere stroke,” says the study’s co-first author, Ryan Staples, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Turkeltaub’s lab.

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