Effect of lexical accessibility on syntactic production in aphasia: An eyetracking study.
Jiyeon Lee
PMID 33012946WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing the person receiving the action first helped people with aphasia produce passives in a lab task, but the effect was smaller than in healthy adults and did not appear in their earliest eye fixations.
Key findings
01People with aphasia showed a lexical priming effect on sentence structure: Theme primes produced more passive responses than Agent primes, but the effect was smaller than in healthy older adults.
02People with aphasia did not show early priming-related eye fixations to the Theme within 400 milliseconds, but showed a later priming-related fixation difference at 400-800 milliseconds.
03People with aphasia who had better non-canonical sentence production or comprehension scores showed larger priming effects on sentence production.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 11 adults with aphasia were tested, and all had mild-to-moderate aphasia with relatively preserved single-word comprehension, naming, and sentence formulation, so results may not apply to severe aphasia. The task was a laboratory picture-description task with written words and practice, not conversation or a treatment study. Only active and passive descriptions of transitive action scenes were tested. The eye-movement differences show planning patterns, not whether a cue helps everyday communication.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the priming effect as proof that word cues are an effective aphasia therapy. The study measured sentence choices and eye movements in a lab task, not treatment outcomes, and the real-time fixation pattern in people with aphasia differed from the healthy group.