Priming Sentence Production in Older Adults: Evidence for Preserved Implicit Learning.

The participants were healthy adults only, not people with aphasia or other communication disorders, so this does not test a clinical treatment. The sample was 24 young adults and 24 older adults, and 20 of the older adults had data reported in an earlier study as a control group. The study did not measure explicit or implicit memory directly, so it cannot confirm that priming was driven by implicit learning. The analysis of adults older than 70 versus adults aged 60 to 69 was exploratory, so it should not be treated as a confirmatory result. Only immediate priming and a 2-lag condition were tested, using a scripted dialogue-like task, so other tasks and longer delays may give different results. At 2-lag, dative priming was small, and when older adults were analyzed separately their dative priming was not significant.

Do not read this as proof that structural priming therapy improves sentence production in older adults with aphasia. The study tested healthy adults only and measured sentence production after hearing structures, not a treatment outcome.