An Evaluation of Shared Reading Groups for Adults Living with Dementia: Preliminary Findings

Purpose – Although there is a growing evidence base for the value of psychosocial and arts based strategies for enhancing wellbeing amongst adults living with dementia, relatively little attention has been paid to literature-based interventions. This service evaluation assesses the impact of Shared Reading (SR) groups, a programme developed and implemented by The Reader Organisation, on quality of life for care home residents with mild/moderate dementia. Design/methodology/approach – Thirty one individuals were recruited from four care homes, which were randomly assigned to either reading-waiting groups (three months reading, followed by three months no reading) or waiting-reading groups (three months no reading, followed by three months reading). Quality of life was assessed by the DEMQOLProxy and psychopathological symptoms were assessed by the NPI-Q. Findings – Compared to the waiting condition, the positive effects of SR on quality of life were demonstrated at the commencement of the reading groups and were maintained once the activity ended. Low levels of baseline symptoms prevented analyses on whether the intervention impacted on the clinical signs of dementia. Limitations – Limitations included the small sample and lack of control for confounding variables. Originality/value – The therapeutic potential of reading groups is discussed as a positive and practical intervention for older adults living with dementia

A literature-based intervention for older people living with dementia

Background: While several studies have explored the impact of literature and reading on mental health, there has been relatively little work done on how a literature-based intervention might impact on the behaviours of those living with dementia. The present report addresses the effect that a specific literature-based intervention – Get into Reading, designed and practised by national charity The Reader Organisation – might have on the health and well-being of people living with dementia. Aims: This present study arises out of a service evaluation that specifically assessed to what extent the shared-reading intervention impacted upon behaviours symptomatic of dementia. Its aims were: (1) to understand the influence that reading has on older adults with dementia in different health-care environments; (2) to identify staff perceptions of the influence that engagement in a reading group has on older adults living with dementia; and (3) to investigate any changes in dementia symptoms of older adults participating in a reading group. Methods: The study employed a mixed-method design conducted within three health-care environments: three care homes, two hospital wards and one day centre. The Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPI-Q) assessed staff views of any changes in dementia symptom severity for participants in reading groups conducted in the care homes. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were then conducted with staff who attended the reading groups and/or had extensive knowledge of service users involved in all of the health-care settings. Responses to questions were recorded verbatim and then subject to thematic analysis. Results: 61 service users and 20 staff members took part in the overall project. The NPI-Q results indicate that symptom scores were lower during the reading group period than at baseline. These findings were supported by the qualitative interviews, which suggested that three themes were perceived to be important to effective engagement with the reading groups: (1) the components of the reading group intervention; (2) enjoyment, authenticity, meaningfulness and renewed sense of personal identity; and (3) enhancement of listening, memory and attention. Conclusions: In light of quantifiable data of limited but indicative status, together with strongly corroborative qualitative evidence, engagement in reading-group activity appeared to produce a significant reduction in dementia symptom severity. Staff interviews indicated the contribution of reading groups to well-being. </jats:sec

What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry

This study investigated how rhyme and meter affect eye movements and subjective aesthetic evaluations while reading poems. Earlier findings suggest that the effects might include prosodic predictability-driven cognitive and affective rewards from increased processing fluency (Blohm, Wagner, Schlesewsky and Menninghaus, 2018, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000), but also semantic and syntactic disfluency, as rhyme and meter are often implemented at the expense of unusual word forms and word order (Menninghaus et al., 2015, Wallot and Menninghaus, 2018). This study set out to investigate the extent to which eye movements might reveal not only distinct effects of fluency and disfluency at the same time, but potentially also hedonic responses that are associated with longer rather than shorter self-motivated exposure, in line with the hypothesis of “savoring” (Frijda and Sundararajan, 2007). The results reveal several fluency-enhancing effects of rhyme and meter on reading times for more global features of the poems, but also increased disfluency effects on gaze durations for some more local features of the poems. Moreover, some of the latter effects are readily interpretable in terms of the savoring hypothesis. Eye movement characteristics that were predictive of higher aesthetic evaluation—irrespective of the presence or absence of rhyme and meter—similarly resulted in increased fluency, disfluency, and savoring effects. Our study thus reveals, for the first time, a complex picture of effects that co-occur while reading poetic prosody, based on analyzing different dimensions of a single psychophysiological variable, namely, eye movements

Electrophysiological Evidence for Impaired Attentional Engagement with Phonologically Acceptable Misspellings in Developmental Dyslexia

Event-related potential (ERP) studies of word recognition have provided fundamental insights into the time-course and stages of visual and auditory word form processing in reading. Here, we used ERPs to track the time-course of phonological processing in dyslexic adults and matched controls. Participants engaged in semantic judgments of visually presented high-cloze probability sentences ending either with (a) their best completion word, (b) a homophone of the best completion, (c) a pseudohomophone of the best completion, or (d) an unrelated word, to examine the interplay of phonological and orthographic processing in reading and the stage(s) of processing affected in developmental dyslexia. Early ERP peaks (N1, P2, N2) were modulated in amplitude similarly in the two groups of participants. However, dyslexic readers failed to show the P3a modulation seen in control participants for unexpected homophones and pseudohomophones (i.e., sentence completions that are acceptable phonologically but are misspelt). Furthermore, P3a amplitudes significantly correlated with reaction times in each experimental condition. Our results showed no sign of a deficit in accessing phonological representations during reading, since sentence primes yielded phonological priming effects that did not differ between participant groups in the early phases of processing. On the other hand, we report new evidence for a deficient attentional engagement with orthographically unexpected but phonologically expected words in dyslexia, irrespective of task focus on orthography or phonology. In our view, this result is consistent with deficiency in reading occurring from the point at which attention is oriented to phonological analysis, which may underlie broader difficulties in sublexical decoding

A comparative study of cognitive behavioural therapy and shared reading for chronic pain

The case for psychosocial interventions in relation to chronic pain, one of the most common health issues in contemporary healthcare, is well-established as a means of managing the emotional and psychological difficulties experienced by sufferers. Using mixed methods, this study compared a standard therapy for chronic pain, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), with a specific literature-based intervention, shared reading (SR) developed by national charity, The Reader. A 5-week CBT group and a 22-week SR group for patients with chronic pain ran in parallel, with CBT group members joining the SR group after the completion of CBT. In addition to self-report measures of positive and negative affect before and after each experience of the intervention, the 10 participants kept twice-daily (12- hourly) pain and emotion diaries. Qualitative data were gathered via literary-linguistic analysis of audio/video�recordings and transcriptions of the CBT and SR sessions and video-assisted individual qualitative interviews with participants. Qualitative evidence indicates SR’s potential as an alternative or long-term follow-up or adjunct to CBT in bringing into conscious awareness areas of emotional pain otherwise passively suffered by patients with chronic pain. In addition, quantitative analysis, albeit of limited pilot data, indicated possible improvements in mood/pain for up to 2 days following SR. Both findings lay the basis for future research involving a larger sample siz

Event-related potential characterisation of the Shakespearean functional shift in narrative sentence structure.

International audienceNeurolinguistic studies have scrutinised the physiological consequences of disruptions in the flow of language comprehension produced by violations of meaning, syntax, or both. Some 400 years ago, Shakespeare already crafted verses in which the functional status of words was changed, as in "to lip a wanton in a secure couch". Here, we tested the effect of word class conversion as used by Shakespeare--the functional shift--on event-related brain potential waves traditionally reported in neurophysiolinguistics: the left anterior negativity (LAN), the N400, and the P600. Participants made meaningfulness decisions to sentences containing (a) a semantic incongruity, (b) a functional shift, (c) a double violation, or (d) neither a semantic incongruity nor a syntactic violation. The Shakespearean functional shift elicited significant LAN and P600 modulations but failed to modulate the N400 wave. This provides evidence that words which had their functional status changed triggered both an early syntactic evaluation process thought to be mainly automatic and a delayed re-evaluation/repair process that is more controlled, but semantic integration required no additional processing. We propose that this dissociation between syntactic and semantic evaluation enabled Shakespeare to create dramatic effects without diverting his public away from meaning

Housman, Richards, and Leavis: Between Physiology and Phenomenology

Neuroliterary studies are becoming increasingly more common. However, a disparity remains between neurophysiological description and phenomenological description. This dissertation argues that neither phenomenology nor neurophysiology alone offer a complete picture of the reading and writing process, but rather must be understood as providing a complementary picture of our interactions with literature. To this end, I attempt to find a physiological pre-history for recent critical shifts (specifically the neurocritic and his neuroliterary field) in the critical works of A.E. Housman (The Name and Nature of Poetry), I.A. Richards (Practical Criticism), and F.R. Leavis (The Great Tradition)

Accessing the power of the play: thoughts on intercultural Shakespeare from examining 'Hamlet' in Japan

This thesis explores some key areas of intercultural Shakespeare through Shakespeare translation and performance in Japanese. It argues that some cultures outside the West, such as Japan, may be able to provide access to and even augment the power of Shakespeare’s plays in certain important ways. After detailing some of the history of Shakespeare in Japan, especially the contribution of the Shakespeare scholar, translator and director Tsubouchi Shôyô, the paper examines three areas of Japanese translation and production that may allow for this type of augmentation, especially through productions and translations of Hamlet. These areas are as follows: firstly, the socio-religious fabric of Japanese society; secondly, certain aspects of the Japanese language including the use of kanji characters and furigana gloss; and finally, the often visual nature of Japanese Shakespeare productions. Throughout, metaphor is found to be a useful tool for accessing Japanese Shakespeare and intercultural theatre. Within the central argument that certain parts of Shakespeare’s work may fit better today in other cultures than in the West, some of the key findings include: the distance between Shakespeare’s original work and productions in the present day West is, in certain ways, bigger than the distance between Shakespeare’s original work and present day Japan; certain types of intercultural theatre may be better framed as acts of intercultural communication, especially as a type of conversation; and that native English speakers may actually translate Shakespeare using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in a fashion similar, although clearly not identical, to how non-native speakers of English must translate Shakespeare

Revisiting lexical ambiguity effects in visual word recognition

2012 - 2013The aim of this work is to focus on how lexically ambiguous words are represented in the mental lexicon of speakers. The existence of words with multiple meanings/senses (e.g., credenza, mora, etc. in Italian) is a pervasive feature of natural language. Routinely speakers of almost all languages encounter ambiguous words, whose correct interpretation is made by recurring to the linguistic context in which these forms are inserted... [edited by author]XII n.s