Implicit structural priming as a treatment component for aphasia: Specifying essential learning conditions

This study applies implicit structural priming as a novel treatment for sentence production in persons with aphasia (PWA), investigating the learning mechanism(s) that drive robust and enduring recovery. Sixteen PWA and 16 controls completed baseline, three training sessions, and 1-day and 1-week post-testing. Each participant received both alternating and single structure prime training conditions to test error-based versus repeated activation-based learning. Both groups showed significantly improved production and maintenance of trained and untrained target sentences in both training conditions. While controls showed greater gains following alternating prime structure training, single prime structure training resulted in greater improvements for PWA. These results suggest that structural priming is an effective training for aphasia. Additionally, to the extent that the different priming conditions reflected different mechanisms underlying the learning and access of impaired structure, increased base-level activation of target syntactic structure supports learning of grammatical encoding in aphasia more effectively than processing prime sentences with competing syntactic structures.