Dysphasia Reading Exercises

According to Informa Healthcare, dysphasia is a condition that affects about 1 million Americans. The condition is also referred to as aphasia and is characterized by impairment in any of the functions relating to communication, such as naming or identifying names of objects or persons, comprehension, repetition, speech, reading or speaking. The primary cause of this disability is brain injury and usually occurs when a person suffers hits, hemorrhages or trauma to the regions of the brain that control speech faculties.

Treatments

• Unfortunately, there are no surgical or medical treatments that can cure dysphasia. Since the person suffering from dysphasia is not retarded mentally, the only approach is to make use of the patient's other faculties to compensate for the deficient abilities. The underlying idea is to identify areas of weakness and to work around them by helping the patient excel in other areas.

Reading

• Patients with receptive dysphasia have the ability to talk and communicate, but their language is incoherent and they usually have no comprehension of what they're saying. Patients with expressive dysphasia have difficulty in expressing thoughts; grammar and flow are usually lacking. Since reading is another of the difficulties a dysphasic patient has, there are some exercises used to strengthen a patient's reading skills so that he can improve his overall ability to understand and express himself.

Exercises

• Reading therapy tries to target the needs of the individual. One method of therapy involves making the patient read the names of objects that she comes across in daily life, such as addresses, names, street names and so on.

  Another method is to read stories out loud to the patient and make her repeat them back as closely as possible. This helps in honing her comprehension abilities.

  Another simple but effective method some neurologists adapt is to make the patient keep reading the alphabet from a list until a sudden signal to stop. The patient has to say at which letter of the alphabet he was asked to stop. All of these methods can improve reading skills as well as general comprehension skills.