Structural Priming Treatment in Aphasia: The Role of Lexical and Abstract Syntactic Representations

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Sentence production deficits are common in people with aphasia (PWA).
• Effective treatments for aphasia sentence production remain limited.
• Structural priming shows promise, but its mechanisms in PWA are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the roles of abstract syntactic priming and lexically boosted priming in improving sentence production in PWA.
• To explore the underlying memory mechanisms (implicit and explicit) that contribute to treatment gains in PWA.

Main Methods:

• Twenty-four PWA and 16 controls underwent priming training (passives, double-object datives) using same-verb and different-verb conditions.
• Memory contributions were assessed using serial reaction time, fragmented picture, and picture pointing span tests.
• Posttesting occurred at 1 day and 1 week to evaluate lasting effects.

Main Results:

• Both PWA and controls demonstrated lasting sentence production improvements.
• PWA showed greater gains with different-verb priming, unlike controls who benefited more from same-verb priming.
• High implicit memory scores correlated with greater treatment effects in both groups; explicit memory benefits were seen only in controls.

Conclusions:

• Structural priming is an effective treatment for sentence production in PWA, particularly when verb-matched priming is not used.
• Lexical differentiation may enhance priming in PWA by facilitating abstract syntactic representation learning.
• Implicit memory plays a significant role in successful sentence production treatment outcomes for PWA.