Assessing oral word reading ability in Serbian speakers with acquired aphasia

Abstract Difficulty reading single words represents a common sequel of acquired neurological injury and common component in aphasic breakdown. Investigation of reading disturbances in Serbian speakers with aphasia has been hampered by lack of any standardised clinical test. We report the development of the Serbian Word Reading Test (SWRT). This first clinical single word assessment for the Serbian language examines reading aloud words from different word classes (concrete and abstract nouns, verbs, adjectives, function words and non-words) and summarises performance based on error types (articulatory, phonological, semantic, neologistic, morphological, visual). Initial piloting with 51 people with aphasia after stroke and 50 control participants without neurological disturbance demonstrated high specificity (0.96) and sensitivity (0.98) for detecting presence of reading impairment. Preliminary comparisons between different aphasic syndromes evidenced contrasting success across varying word-classes. Analyses demonstrated significant differences in susceptibility to different reading errors according to aphasia subtype. Cross-language comparisons show largely similar profiles of breakdown to other languages despite the differing morphological and orthographic characteristics of Serbian. We present the SWRT as a valid and reliable clinical and research tool.