Lexical Priming Effects According to the Priming Type and Word Order Canonicity on Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: An Eye-Tracking Study

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to examine if persons with aphasia (PWA) can use word-level information as a sentence production strategy. Specifically, we examined the effect of lexical priming on the production of passive sentences, using an eye tracking-while-speaking paradigm. Methods: Twelve PWA and twelve healthy adults (HA) described transitive action pictures in sentences following lexical (agent or theme) primes. The priming effect was calculated using both off-line (syntactic production) and real-time (eye fixations) measures. Off-line priming effects were analyzed in terms of prime type (agent vs. theme) and word order canonicity, and the on-line analyses were conducted by the prime type and five speech regions. Results: 1) PWA did not show a significant difference from the HA group in the production of passive sentences under the theme prime condition. The proportion of passives was significantly higher in the theme prime condition compared to the agent prime condition and in canonical word order versus non-canonical word order. 2) PWA showed reduced eye fixations to the theme character compared to HA and showed evenly distributed fixations to both agent and theme characters. PWA did not show reliable differences in five speech regions. Conclusion: In off-line passive production, PWA showed preserved lexical priming effects; however, they did not show a significant prime effect on eye fixations. These findings suggest that PWA have relatively intact ability to use word-level cues on syntactic production during off-line sentence production.