Effect of Digital Highlighting on Reading Comprehension Given Text-to-Speech Technology for People with Aphasia.

Participants had varying aphasia severities and profiles, and the number in each severity group varied substantially, so the study did not test how severity affected comprehension or preference. Too few participants scored below the cut-off on a standardized spoken paragraph comprehension subtest to analyse whether test performance related to reading accuracy. The articles were edited to similar length and grade level, and highlighting formatting was sometimes altered, so results may not apply to all real-world newspaper articles or all text-to-speech software. The study did not deeply assess attention or working memory, so cognitive contributors to comprehension with highlighting could not be fully considered. The study did not measure whether participants actually tracked the highlighted words or sentences. Comprehension questions were factual multiple-choice items, not inferential questions, so the results speak to surface factual comprehension.

Do not conclude that highlighting improves comprehension because participants preferred it. Comprehension accuracy did not differ significantly across conditions, and preference did not match accuracy.