Assessment of Aphasics Fluent in Portuguese Language Using Eye-Tracking

People with aphasia have difficulty understanding sentences, especially those that do not follow a canonical order. In the last two decades, cross-linguistic studies have used eye-tracking techniques to investigate language comprehension and production. The literature already records the use of these techniques in several populations with comprehension and communication disorders, including aphasia. However, studies of this type are scarce in Portuguese language. This research approaches the use of eye tracking technique to investigate sentence comprehension in aphasic patients, resulting from brain lesion. To this end, a computational tool was developed, based on the Tobii PCEye Mini device. The goal is to help speech therapists in the evaluation of auditory comprehension in Brazilians individuals with aphasia. The data were collected in an experiment with eight volunteers with and without aphasia, equally divided into an experimental and a control groups, respectively. The results show that the selected tasks imposed greater cognitive demands on aphasics than on control group members, and this was identified by eye tracking. This technique, combined with the comprehension test of clinical use (TROG-2), results in an adequate solution to evaluate the comprehension of the aphasic individual in Portuguese and thus establish a more assertive rehabilitation program.