What a new study of everyday reading habits means for adults recovering from TBI, and for the clinicians who support them

Ask most adults what they read in a day, and books probably won’t come first. Texts, emails, social media posts, a recipe, a work document: reading is woven through nearly everything we do. Yet when speech-language pathologists assess reading after a traumatic brain injury (TBI), we usually hand someone a passage from an academic-style test and measure speed and comprehension.
A 2026 study by Katy O’Brien and colleagues in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology asked a different question: what do adults with TBI actually read in daily life, how much, why, and in what format?

What the researchers did
The team surveyed 595 adults ages 18 to 65: 170 with mild TBI, 55 with moderate-severe TBI, and 370 adults with no history of TBI. Everyone completed the Reading Habits Inventory, a self-report measure covering how often people read different materials (from novels to emails to recipes), how long they read, why they read, and whether they prefer screens or print.

What they found
Leisure reading drops after TBI. About 78% of adults without TBI read leisure materials at least weekly, compared with 61% of adults with mild TBI and 51% with moderate-severe TBI. The gap was driven mostly by fiction (59% of controls vs. 42% mild and 27% moderate-severe) and magazines. The groups also differed in how they described their reading time: adults without TBI reported a median of 40% spent reading for pleasure, versus 20% in the mild TBI group and 17.5% in the moderate-severe group.
But once people start, they read just as long. Among those who read leisure materials weekly, daily time was not meaningfully different across groups, at roughly 52 minutes for controls, 40 for mild TBI, and 44 for moderate-severe. The authors read this as an initiation gap rather than a capacity gap. The barrier may be getting started, not sustaining it.
Functional reading goes up. Adults with mild TBI who read functional materials (recipes, manuals, catalogs) spent about 22 minutes a day on them, compared with 11 for controls. The authors suggest this may be compensatory: using written instructions to scaffold tasks that used to run on memory or habit. They are careful to say this needs further study.
Communication dominates everyone’s day. Nearly all participants read emails, texts, and social media at least weekly, and it accounted for roughly 200 minutes a day, about three times any other category, with no difference between groups.
Format preferences shift a bit. The TBI groups leaned toward screens for leisure and short-form informational reading, but no individual material held up after statistical correction, so this is a trend to watch rather than a firm finding.

For clinicians
• Assess what clients actually read. Standardized tests capture passage comprehension. They don’t capture email, texting, or social media, which is where most reading time goes.
• Treat leisure reading as a legitimate goal. Leisure reading is linked to better well-being, and the study’s pattern suggests the target may be lowering the threshold to begin (avoidance, anticipated fatigue, low motivation) rather than rebuilding stamina.
• Match format to purpose and symptoms. Screens aren’t uniformly avoided or tolerated. Ask about font size, contrast, text-to-speech, and visual fatigue, which is common after mild TBI.
• Don’t assume uniform decline. Understanding a client’s shifting reading priorities may be more useful than assuming reading is simply “worse.”

For adults living with TBI
If reading feels harder, or less appealing than it used to, you are not alone, and it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. The adults in this study kept reading, especially to stay connected and get things done. If you’ve drifted away from books or magazines you once loved, a speech-language pathologist can help you find a way back in: shorter sessions, a different format, audio support, or simply a lower-pressure place to start.

An honest caveat
This study relied on self-report, which can be imperfect, especially when memory is affected. It was cross-sectional, so we can’t tell whether differences came from the injury or from reading habits that existed beforehand. The survey hasn’t been formally validated, the sample was mostly White, the mild TBI group was mostly female, and the moderate-severe group was small (55 adults). The findings point toward what matters in assessment and treatment. They don’t yet prove what works.

Sources
O’Brien, K. H., Pei, Y., Vruwink, O., Becker, N., Klukas, C., & Covington, N. V. (2026). Reading after traumatic brain injury: Shifts in engagement, purpose, and format across everyday material types. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. https://doi.org/10.1044/2026_AJSLP-26-00153 — primary source for this post