Evidence-based Modeling for Acquired Dyslexia Treatments

Summary

This study is a low-risk, early phase 1, multicenter trial to test the use of a computational (neural network) cognitive model of reading to simulate acquired dyslexia and its treatment. The aim is to determine whether there is an advantage to receiving the treatment the model predicts to be advantageous compared to the alternative treatment. All participants will receive two full rounds of treatment. A round of treatment will consist of either phonomotor treatment (PMT) or semantic feature analysis (SFA) for 60 hours, distributed over 5 days a week for 2 hours a day.

Eligibility

Age range

18–85 years

Sex

All

Healthy volunteers

No

Interventions

• Behavioral
  Phono-Motor Therapy

  Orthographic stimuli (letters) are introduced from the beginning as each phoneme is being trained. This maintains the focus on phonology, while emphasizing its relevance to reading. PMT consists of an initial phase focused on training of individual phonemes and phoneme sequences in spoken language, followed by written language tasks. English phonemes are first trained in isolation, followed by phoneme sequences in words and pseudowords. They are trained multi-modally through emphasis on auditory, motor, tactile-kinesthetic, visual, and orthographic representations for each consonant and vowel. When sequences are introduced, focus on phonology is maintained by training on pseudowords first before real words are introduced. Participants work on identifying, repeating, parsing, blending, and manipulating phonemes that make up the pseudoword and word stimuli. To maintain focus on phonology, pictures and definitions of the stimuli are never shown or discussed.

• Behavioral
  Semantic Feature Analysis

  SFA activates semantic features of the target word to help retrieve the spoken form of the word. To target reading, a modified SFA is used with written words rather than pictures as the primary materials. Pictures are instead included for each word as a semantic feature. Stimuli will consist of 80 highly imageable nouns with a range of word frequencies. During treatment the therapist will present a written noun and ask the participant a series of questions about the features of that noun. For example, if the presented noun is "juice", the therapist would have the participant select the corresponding picture from an array of pictures. The therapist then would ask, "what do you do with it?" (eliciting a feature from the "function" category) and "where do you store it in your home?" (eliciting a feature from the "context" category). This is done for a total of 6 categories of semantic features. The process is repeated until the participant reads the noun correctly three times in a row.

Locations (3)