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The time-course of lexical activation during sentence comprehension in people with aphasia
Michelle Ferrill1, Tracy Love, Matthew Walenski
1San Diego State University, CA, USA.
Purpose:
To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented canonical (subject-verb-object) constructions in young, neurologically unimpaired control participants and participants with left-hemisphere damage and agrammatic aphasia.
Method:
A cross modal picture priming (CMPP) paradigm was used to test 114 control participants and 8 participants with agrammatic aphasia for priming of a lexical item (direct object noun) immediately after it is initially encountered in the ongoing auditory stream and at 3 additional time points at 400-ms intervals.
Results:
The control participants demonstrated immediate activation of the lexical item, followed by a rapid loss (decay). The participants with aphasia demonstrated delayed activation of the lexical item.
Conclusion:
This evidence supports the hypothesis of a delay in lexical activation in people with agrammatic aphasia. The delay in lexical activation feeds syntactic processing too slowly, contributing to comprehension deficits in people with agrammatic aphasia.
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