An investigation of mediated priming and lexical access in aphasia /

The present study was conducted to examine semantic and phonologically mediated priming in normal and brain-damaged populations. Non-fluent and fluent aphasic patients and age-matched control subjects performed an auditory lexical decision task in three separate experimental subtests: semantic priming (e.g., manner-way), minimally-distinct mediated priming (e.g., nanner-way), and maximally-distinct mediated priming (e.g., zanner-way). Consistent with expectations, the findings revealed semantic priming effects in all groups. Interestingly, contrary to predictions based on previous studies, both non-fluent and fluent aphasic patient groups demonstrated mediated priming in both the minimally-distinct and the maximally-distinct subtests that was comparable to mediated priming effects shown by the normal control subjects. The results are discussed in light of current hypotheses concerning the nature of lexical access impairments in brain-damaged individuals. In addition, implications for models of normal word recognition are considered