Strategies to Accommodate Reading (STAR)
People with aphasia often understand spoken utterances better than written sentences. They also benefit from having content appear in multiple rather than single modalities. Because text-to-speech (TTS) systems accommodate both of these functions, it provides an ideal basis for a reading intervention. TTS systems convert written text to provide both text and auditory information. Research about using TTS supports with people with aphasia has not extended beyond basic case studies and our studies of sentence level comprehension. Hence, no evidence exists about varying TTS features-such as speech output, speech rate, and text highlighting-known to benefit others with reading problems. Also, social acceptance of TTS is not well understood, even though it is critical to adoption and long-term use of the technology. The purpose of this study is to evaluate various aspects of multimodality presentation of material through TTS systems used by people with aphasia. The immediate outcome of the proposed research will be evidence-based recommendations for selecting and adjusting TTS systems and features. This work will enable clinicians to maximize benefits for adults with varying aphasia profiles. We also will obtain initial evidence about the social validity and perceived value of TTS system use for this population.
Start: May 2018