Do photographs help people with chronic aphasia understand stories they read?

Details

People with aphasia often also have reading comprehension deficits that interfere with full participation in leisure and social activities involving written text. The study explored how three levels of visuographic support—high-context photographs, low-context photographs, and no photographs—affected narrative reading comprehension in people with chronic aphasia.

The participants were seven adults with chronic aphasia and accompanying reading comprehension deficits. Each participant read three narratives, each presented with a different level of visuographic support. In a repeated-measures design, researchers examined reading comprehension response accuracy as the number of correct responses, response time in seconds, and participants' perceptions of how helpful the images were.

Response accuracy was significantly higher when either type of photograph was present than when no photographs were present. Response times were significantly faster without photographs than with either high- or low-context photographs. Descriptive statistics on participants' perceptions, which were not analysed for statistical significance, supported the idea that pictures were helpful and the tasks were easier when either type of visuographic support was present.

The researchers concluded that further research is needed to determine the most efficient way to present visuographic supports to people with aphasia during reading comprehension tasks.