Priming sentence comprehension in aphasia: Effects of lexically independent and specific structural priming.

The study tested laboratory sentence comprehension, not everyday communication or treatment outcomes. The aphasia group was small, with 18 participants analysed in each experiment, and the aphasia types and severity varied. People with aphasia were less accurate than controls on the prime sentences, and reading comprehension was not comprehensively assessed, so reading difficulty may have affected some results. The study used only six verbs from one semantic category, so the findings may not extend to other verbs or sentence materials. Response times were not constrained by a time limit, making the timing results harder to interpret. The study did not compare comprehension-to-production or production-to-comprehension priming, so it cannot show whether the same priming mechanism supports production.

Do not conclude that structural priming is an effective aphasia treatment. This was a laboratory comprehension task with 18 people with aphasia per experiment, and it did not test therapy or communication outcomes.