The time-course of lexical activation during sentence comprehension in people with aphasia.

Abstract

PURPOSE:

To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented canonical (subject-verb-object) constructions in young, neurologically unimpaired control participants and participants with left-hemisphere damage and agrammatic aphasia.

METHOD:

A cross modal picture priming (CMPP) paradigm was used to test 114 control participants and 8 participants with agrammatic aphasia for priming of a lexical item (direct object noun) immediately after it is initially encountered in the ongoing auditory stream and at 3 additional time points at 400-ms intervals.

RESULTS:

The control participants demonstrated immediate activation of the lexical item, followed by a rapid loss (decay). The participants with aphasia demonstrated delayed activation of the lexical item.

CONCLUSION:

This evidence supports the hypothesis of a delay in lexical activation in people with agrammatic aphasia. The delay in lexical activation feeds syntactic processing too slowly, contributing to comprehension deficits in people with agrammatic aphasia.

• Authors: Michelle Ferrill, Tracy Love, Matthew Walenski, Lewis P Shapiro
• Journal: American journal of speech-language pathology (Am J Speech Lang Pathol) Vol. 21 Issue 2 Pg. S179-89 (May 2012) ISSN: 1558-9110 [Electronic] United States
• PMID: 22355007 (Publication Type: Journal Article, Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural)

Topics

• Adolescent
• Adult
• Aged
• Aged, 80 and over
• Aphasia, Broca (physiopathology)
• Cerebral Infarction (physiopathology)
• Comprehension (physiology)
• Female
• Humans
• Language Tests
• Linguistics
• Male
• Middle Aged
• Psycholinguistics
• Reaction Time (physiology)
• Repetition Priming (physiology)
• Speech Perception (physiology)
• Young Adult