Overview

• Stroke survivors with superior temporal sulcus damage lost the usual reading advantage of high-imageability words, revealing an inability to use word meanings to aid recognition.
• MRI lesion mapping pinpointed the superior temporal sulcus and adjacent pathways as critical for linking word forms to their underlying concepts.
• Researchers compared reading aloud of high- and low-imageability words in 56 left-hemisphere stroke survivors against 68 controls to isolate semantic-phonological integration deficits.
• Published in Brain and funded by NIH NIDCD grants R01DC020446 and R01DC014960, this work offers the strongest evidence yet for a separable post-stroke semantic reading disorder.
• Investigators have received a new five-year NIH grant to compare reading changes in normal aging versus post-stroke populations and to guide development of mechanism-based therapies.