Acquired Dyslexia Modeling and Treatment

Official title

Evidence-based Modeling for Acquired Dyslexia Treatments

Overview

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.

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
• 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 ex

Primary outcome measures

• Woodcock Reading Mastery Test - III [Time frame: Baseline, following the first 60 hours of therapy, and following the final 60 hours of therapy.]
• Test words and pseudowords [Time frame: Baseline, following the first 60 hours of therapy, and following the final 60 hours of therapy.]

Secondary outcome measures (2)

• Western Aphasia Battery - Revised [Time frame: Baseline, following the first 60 hours of therapy, and following the final 60 hours of therapy.]
• Comprehensive Aphasia Test - Disability Quotient [Time frame: Baseline, following the first 60 hours of therapy, and following the final 60 hours of therapy.]

Eligibility criteria

Inclusion criteria

• Fluent in English as a first language pre-stroke by self report.
• Normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
• Normal or aided hearing.
• Left hemisphere ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke (as verified by a structural brain scan).
• Impaired reading as confirmed by significant impairment in the Basic Skills cluster of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test - III.

Exclusion criteria

• Diagnosed pre-stroke neurological disease affecting the brain other than left hemisphere stroke.
• Severe apraxia of speech (determined by consensus judgment among speech-language pathologists).
• History of learning disabilities such as developmental dyslexia or current self-reported major psychiatric disorders.
• Inability to undergo, or provide a copy of, a post-stroke brain imaging scan.

Criteria are shown verbatim from the registry (in English). Final eligibility is always assessed by the study center.

Healthy volunteers: No

Study design

Allocation

Non-randomized

Model

Crossover

Masking

Single blind

Primary purpose

Treatment

Study locations

United States · 3 centers

• Florida State University — Tallahassee
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — Baltimore
• Kessler Foundation — West Orange

Identifiers

NCT: NCT07209488 · Pro2025001100 · R56DC022256

Primary sources (government registries)

• ClinicalTrials.gov (US NIH)

View this study on ClinicalTrials.gov ↗