Acquired dyslexia in Serbian speakers with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

• People with aphasia also experienced reading problems after stroke.
• Similar error types occurred with different aphasia types, but phonological/morphological dyslexia dominated in Broca’s, semantic misreadings were more common with Wernicke’s aphasia.
• Serbian has a rich morphology which possibly accounts for the high proportion of inflectional errors.
• From the language and reading analyses we infer that findings reflect views of frontal lobes as involved in sound and syntax processing, with posterior sites linked to visual/meaning aspects of reading.

This study examined patterns of acquired dyslexia in Serbian aphasic speakers, comparing profiles of groups with Broca’s versus Wernicke’s aphasia. The study also looked at the relationship of reading and auditory comprehension and between reading comprehension and reading aloud in these groups. Participants were 20 people with Broca’s and 20 with Wernicke’s aphasia. They were asked to read aloud and to understand written material from the Serbian adaptation of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. A Serbian Word Reading Aloud Test was also used. The people with Broca’s aphasia achieved better results in reading aloud and in reading comprehension than those with Wernicke’s aphasia. Those with Wernicke’s aphasia showed significantly more semantic errors than those with Broca’s aphasia who had significantly more morphological and phonological errors. From the data we inferred that lesion sites accorded with previous work on networks associated with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia and with a posterior-anterior axis for reading processes centred on (left) parietal-temporal-frontal lobes.