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Background: Many persons with aphasia (PWA) show deficits in sentence production and comprehension which are, in part, attributed to an inefficient mapping between messages and syntactic structures. Structural priming-the tendency to repeat a previously encountered sentence structure-has been shown to support implicit syntactic learning within and across production and comprehension modalities in healthy adults. Structural priming is effective in facilitating the production or comprehension of sentences in PWA. However, less is known about whether priming in one modality changes PWA's performance in the other modality, which is crucial evidence needed for developing structural priming as a cost-effective intervention strategy in aphasia.Aims: This study examined (a) whether production to comprehension cross-modality priming is effective in PWA, (b) whether priming-induced changes in syntactic comprehension lasted even in the absence of an immediate prime, and (c) whether there is a significant correlation between individuals' priming effects and the change in their comprehension following priming.Methods & Procedures: Thirteen PWA and 13 age-matched control participants completed a training study comprised of three phases: a pre-test, a production-to-comprehension priming block, and a post-test. In the pre-and post-tests, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task with sentences involving interpretations of an ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., The teacher is poking the monk with a bat). Participants were free to choose a picture corresponding to a high attachment (HA; e.g., the teacher is using the bat to poke the monk) or a low attachment (LA; e.g., the monk is the one holding the bat) interpretation. In the priming block, participants produced LA sentences as prime and then completed a sentence-picture matching task for comprehension targets, similar to the pre-test.Results: Age-matched controls and PWA showed a significant priming effect when comparing the priming block to the pre-test. In both groups, the priming effect persisted when comparing picture selections in the pre-and post-tests. At the individual level, age-matched controls who showed larger priming effects also selected more LA pictures in the post-test compared to the

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.