BackgroundGrammatical encoding is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA), resulting in deficits in sentence production accuracies and underlying planning processes. However, relatively little is known on how these grammatical encoding deficits can be mediated in PWA. This study aimed to facilitate off-line (accuracy) and real-time (eye fixations) encoding of passive sentences through implicit structural priming, a tendency to better process a current sentence because of its grammatical similarity to a previously experienced (prime) sentence.MethodSixteen PWA and Sixteen age-matched controls completed an eyetracking-while-speaking task, where they described a target transitive picture preceded by a comprehension prime involving either an active or passive form. We measured immediate and cumulative priming effects on proportions of passives produced for the target pictures and proportions of eye fixations made to the theme actor in the target scene before speech onset of the sentence production.Results and conclusionBoth PWA and controls produced cumulatively more passives as the experiment progressed despite an absence of immediate priming effects in PWA. Both groups also showed cumulative changes in the pre-speech eye fixations associated with passive productions, with this cumulative priming effect greater for the PWA group. These findings suggest that structural priming results in gradual adaptation of the grammatical encoding processes of PWA and that structural priming may be used as a treatment component for improving grammatical deficits in aphasia.

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G e 0 t h e r m E x, I Il C. BERKELEY, CA. 94707 JAMES B. KOENIG (415) 527-9876 MURRAY C. GARDNER GEOLOGY Geologic Setting The prospect area is located at the eastern edge of the Late Precambrian to Early Mesozoic Cordilleran geosyncline, adjacent to the Wyoming-Utah foreland. amphibolite, schist, gneiss and granite. These are & b y 15,000 to 25,000 feet of Proterozoic metasedimentary and minor metavolcanic rocks of greenschist metamorphic grade. The Late Precambrian rocks are apparently absent from the foreland area, indicating that the distinction between the shelf and the geosyncline was already established before the beginning of Cambrian deposit ion. The oldest rocks in the geos cline are From Early Cambrian through Triassic time the eastern part of the geosyncline received several tens of thousands of feet of sediments, compared to about 6,000 feet of time-equivalent rocks on the Wyoming shelf. The geosynclinal section consists of thick basal Cambrian quartzites, overlain by Middle Cambrian through Mississippian age marine carbonate rocks with very subordinate amounts of sandstone and shale. In Pennsylvanian through Early Triassic time, carbonate rocks, though abundant, are exceeded by sandstones and shales. Geosynclinal sedimentation came to an end with the deposition of non-marine sandstones and shales in Late Triassic-Early Jurassic time. The recognizable tectonic activity during this long period consisted of episodic regional upwarping and downwarping defining the basins of deposition. By Middle Jurassic time, much of the old geosyncline was being uplifted and the axes of deposition had begun a progressive shift to the east, across the hinge-line onto the former shelf. This shift culminated duringcretaceous time, in the folding of the Paleozoic-Early 'Mesozoic geosynclinal rocks and the development of major overthrust zones in which the geosynclinal rocks were displaced to the east, over the shelf margin. the western side, and in the hanging wall of the Bannock thrust, one of the major thrust faults of the region. The project area is located on During early Cenozoic time the area was apparently undergoing ng erosion, but by Late Miocene or Early Pliocene time, large lacustrine basins had developed, probably coincident with the onset of Basin and Range faulting. Thick fluvial and lacustrine deposits occur over large areas in these basins. normal faulting in Late Pliocene and Pleistocenc time gave rise to Increasing intensity of 901 MENDOCINO AVE. GeothermEx, Inc. BERKELEY,CA. 94707 JAMES B. KOENIG (415) 527-9876 MURRAY C. GARDNER a c t i v i t y. Traces of copper, l e a d and z i n c m i n e r a l i z a t i o n occur i n Cambrian rocks