TTS in aphasia

Many persons with aphasia suffer from reading difficulties. Considering today’s literacy-dependent world, these problems severely restrict participation in society, often leading to social exclusion. The aim of this PhD project is to investigate whether adapting text-to-speech (TTS) technology and combining it with automatic text simplification can result in a useful tool for persons with aphasia and acquired reading difficulties.
The project is led by the University of Barcelona (department of information and communication technologies); Ineke van der Meulen is co-promotor. In 2019 and 2020, two experiments on Spanish speaking persons with aphasia and reading difficulties were performed investigating which TTS system can best be used in this population and whether text simplification does improve patient’s comprehension of a text. A review on reading tools in aphasia and TTS was published and a manuscript describing the results on the experiment on several TTS systems in persons with aphasia was submitted.