Lost for words? Selection in sentence generation

Research on Dynamic Aphasia, a disorder of conversational language, suggests that the condition results from an inability to select words to use in a sentence. The present study investigated whether high frequency words (HFW) and proper nouns (PN) can be primed to reduce or enhance the number of responses that compete for selection in sentence generation. Both young and older adults completed the priming phase that consisted of generating multiple associations or a single association for a target word. After a distracter task, participants were then required to generate a single sentence using the same target words that had been previously presented to them. Reaction times, errors and primed associationsentence generation matches were analyzed. It was expected that reaction times for HFW and PN primed with a single association would be faster than those primed with multiple associations due to decreased competition and hence selection demands. It was also predicted that more associations generated in the single association conditions would be used in the subsequently generated sentences than those generated in the multiple association condition due to reduced selection demands. Results revealed that PN elicited faster response times than HFW across both age groups. There was no age effect of association matches, reaction time difference scores or the number of errors produced in the testing phase. However, contrary to hypotheses, young adults produced more association matches and faster reaction times to words primed with multiple associations. Theoretical and practical implications and future directions for research are discussed