Does aphantasia affect reading comprehension?
Aphantasia does not prevent comprehension. It changes how a person experiences a story. A student might track the plot perfectly while missing the visual or physical feeling of the words.
Sometimes comprehension is affected, and the pattern is specific enough to be a real clue. Students typically track plot, character motivation, and cause and effect accurately. Their comprehension can be excellent. However, their answers tend to sound factual rather than descriptive. This is not because they read carelessly. It is because they did not experience the book visually.
Where it gets harder is fiction that relies on mental simulation. When a sentence describes someone grabbing a handle and pulling hard, most readers run a quick physical simulation. That is how the meaning lands. Without that simulation, comprehension becomes a little flatter. The words are understood, but the action behind them is not fully felt.
The clearest signal is a gap between nonfiction and fiction performance. The nonfiction test goes fine, but the fiction test falls apart. This same pattern applies to math word problems. The farmer's field and the train leaving the station both require simulating a physical scene before the math even starts. That simulation is the part that does not work.