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

Although optional elements of speech, speakers frequently use adjunct phrases (e.g., on the rug, by the weekend) to enrich message content in communication. However, little is known about how adjunct phrases are processed in persons with aphasia (PWAs) and strategies to improve their production. This study sought to improve production of locative adjuncts in sentence and discourse tasks in PWAs using implicit structural priming and examined what factors (lexical overlap, sentential position, aphasia severity) impact degrees of structural priming effects.

Twenty PWAs and 20 age- and education-matched controls completed a pretest, a structural priming task, and a posttest. During the priming task, participants read prime sentences with and without locative adjuncts and then described target pictures in sentences. In the pretest and posttest, participants completed three discourse production tasks.

Both groups produced more locative adjuncts in target sentences following primes with locative adjuncts compared to those without. While lexical overlap boosted priming effects in both groups, there was no significant difference in priming effects by the sentential position (initial vs. final) of locative adjuncts. Priming effects also generalized to discourse tasks, with both groups producing a higher proportion of locative adjuncts in their connected speech after the priming task.

Structural priming resulted in cumulative and generalizable production of optional locative adjuncts in sentence and discourse production in both groups, suggesting its potential to support language production beyond specific syntactic structures.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30532967.