We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
👀 80% of your aphasia patients also have this
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Hey Reader – Quick question: when you get a new aphasia referral, how much of your evaluation is focused on reading? Alexia tends to be a small part of the assessment, and while functional reading always gets a goal in the treatment plan, the depth of evaluation and treatment it actually warrants often gets squeezed out by everything else on the caseload, right? 🙈 Given that over 80% of people with aphasia present with alexia… that’s a gap worth noting. The thing is, “acquired alexia” isn’t a simple diagnosis. It’s an umbrella term covering several distinct subtypes, each requiring its own treatment approach. (But if you need a refresher, you're in luck! 😘) We just published a deep dive on everything SLPs need to know about acquired alexia – from the Dual Route Cascaded Model and how it maps to the alexia subtypes, to a breakdown of evidence-based treatments at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. There’s also a solid list of assessments, including several free tools you may not have yet! 💝
If you think about all the ways reading impacts our daily lives… responding to text messages, paying bills, checking a medication label, ordering from a menu... that's what's at stake for your patients. They deserve your best – and we're here to help you bring it. You've got this! ♥️ Warmly, P.S. Treatments, handouts, and client homework for everything covered in this article are ready and waiting in the Tactus Virtual Rehab Center. Try it free for 3 weeks! |
Tactus Therapy
We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
Your brain keeps two records of everything you read. One stores the gist. This is the meaning, the shape of it, what it was roughly about. The other stores the verbatim trace: the actual words, the specific details, the data point in the third paragraph. The gist is durable. It sticks around, gets consolidated into long-term memory, and becomes part of what you "know." The verbatim trace is fragile. It starts degrading almost immediately. To be fair, it's supposed to. Retaining every word of...
Reading a text message. Skimming a menu. Catching up on the news. Most of us don't think twice about these things... until we can't do them the way we used to. After a stroke or brain injury, reading often gets harder, slower, and more exhausting. If you've noticed this, you're not alone. 🧠 What's going on in the brain Reading isn't a single skill. It's a complex chain of steps your brain performs in a fraction of a second: recognizing letters, combining them into words, pulling meaning from...
A patient reads “dog” easily. And the non-word “slib” without hesitation. But show them “plaid" and they said "played." The word "island" becomes "iz-land." What's going on here? 🤔 Answer: surface alexia (the phonological route is intact; irregularly spelled words are a struggle) If you got that – kudos! 🤗If you didn’t… don’t beat yourself up. 🥴 Even if you nailed the diagnosis, the treatment details for surface alexia might be rusty. As SLPs, we're expected to hold a lot of information in...