Priming Adjuncts in Sentence and Discourse Production in Neurotypical Adults and Persons With Aphasia

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Neurolinguistics
• Speech and Language Pathology

Background:

• Adjunct phrases enrich communication but their processing in persons with aphasia (PWAs) is understudied.
• Strategies to improve adjunct phrase production in PWAs require further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To enhance the production of locative adjuncts in sentence and discourse tasks in PWAs.
• To investigate the impact of implicit structural priming on adjunct production.
• To examine factors influencing structural priming effects, including lexical overlap, sentential position, and aphasia severity.

Main Methods:

• Twenty PWAs and 20 controls participated in pretest, structural priming, and posttest phases.
• Participants described target pictures after reading prime sentences with or without locative adjuncts.
• Discourse production was assessed using three tasks in pretest and posttest.

Main Results:

• Both groups showed increased production of locative adjuncts following primes containing them.
• Lexical overlap enhanced priming effects, while sentential position did not significantly impact them.
• Priming effects generalized to discourse tasks, increasing adjuncts in connected speech.

Conclusions:

• Structural priming cumulatively and generally improved optional locative adjunct production in sentence and discourse tasks for both groups.
• This suggests structural priming can support language production beyond specific syntactic structures.