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Phonological, semantic, and mediated priming in aphasia
1School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. INSR@MUSICB.MCGILL.CA
Brain and Language
|December 17, 1997
Summary
This study on aphasia found that rhyming and semantic word priming speeds up responses in a lexical decision task. However, mediated priming effects were not observed in nonfluent or fluent aphasic patients.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
- Speech and Language Pathology
Background:
- Auditory lexical decision tasks assess word recognition.
- Aphasia, a language disorder, affects lexical access.
- Priming effects (rhyme, semantic, mediated) are used to study word processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate rhyme, semantic, and mediated priming in nonfluent and fluent aphasia.
- To compare priming effects in aphasic patients and normal controls.
- To understand the integrity of lexical access in aphasia.
Main Methods:
- An auditory lexical decision task was employed.
- Participants included nonfluent aphasic patients, fluent aphasic patients, and normal controls.
- Monosyllabic word targets were used with rhyming, semantic, and unrelated primes.
Main Results:
- Rhyming primes (words and nonwords) significantly facilitated lexical decisions compared to unrelated primes.
- Semantically related primes also facilitated lexical decisions to word targets.
- No evidence of mediated priming was found across groups.
Conclusions:
- Lexical access in aphasia is influenced by phonological (rhyme) and semantic relationships.
- The absence of mediated priming suggests potential difficulties in indirect semantic retrieval pathways in aphasia.
- Individual subject data indicate varied priming patterns within aphasic groups.