Structural Priming in Aphasia
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1
University of Sheffield, Human Communication Sciences, United Kingdom
Structural priming is a tendency among language users to make use of linguistic structures they have recently encountered. Despite a large body of research showing structural priming in healthy speakers of various languages, and the potential implications of this research in theories of conversation and of language learning, evidence for structural priming in people with aphasia is extremely limited both in scale and scope. This study investigates structural priming in people with aphasia using a picture-describing paradigm that has been well established in studies with non-impaired language users (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). The aims of this study are twofold. First, to establish whether or not people with aphasia are sensitive to structural priming, how sensitive they are to priming, and what aspects of their language profiles affect sensitivity to priming. Second, to examine the role of the verb in the structural priming process. It has been established that repeating the verb across priming sentences boosts the structural priming effect, but that this so-called “lexical boost” decays rapidly compared to the persistence of the structural priming effect itself (Hartsuiker, Bernolet, Schoonbaert, Speybroeck, & Vanderelst, 2008). This study investigates whether a lexical boost occurs in people with aphasia, and considers the results in terms of two potentially complementary explanations for structural priming, the alignment explanation and the implicit learning explanation (Ferreira & Bock, 2006). Preliminary results of this study are presented, and their implications for both theories are discussed.
References
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75(2), B13-B25. doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(99)00081-5
Ferreira, V. S., & Bock, K. (2006). The functions of structural priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(7-8), 1011-1029. doi:10.1080/01690960600824609
Hartsuiker, R. J., Bernolet, S., Schoonbaert, S., Speybroeck, S., & Vanderelst, D. (2008). Syntactic priming persists while the lexical boost decays: Evidence from written and spoken dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 214-238. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.07.003
Keywords:
structural priming,
Aphasia,
interactive alignment,
syntactic priming,
Verb processing,
Lexical boost,
aphasia syntax
Conference:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.
Presentation Type:
Poster Sessions
Topic:
Academy of Aphasia
Citation:
Buddery
AP,
Herbert
RE and
Cowell
PE
(2016). Structural Priming in Aphasia.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00012
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Received:
18 Apr 2016;
Published Online:
15 Aug 2016.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Andy P Buddery, University of Sheffield, Human Communication Sciences, Sheffield, S10 2TS, United Kingdom, apgbuddery1@sheffield.ac.uk