These data provide continued evidence that masked repetition priming can have a positive effect on naming for people with anomia. Factors that may influence participant response and additional questions that must be settled for this line of research to continue are discussed.

Purpose Previous research has suggested that impairments of automatic spreading activation may underlie some aphasic language deficits. This study further investigated the status of automatic spreading activation in individuals with aphasia as compared with typical adults. Method Participants were 21 individuals with aphasia (12 fluent, 9 non-fluent) and 31 typical adults. Reaction time data were collected on a lexical decision task with masked repetition primes, assessed at 11 different interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Masked primes were used to assess automatic spreading activation without the confound of conscious processing. The various ISIs were used to assess the time to onset, and duration, of priming effects. Results The control group showed maximal priming in the 200 ms ISI condition, with significant priming at a range of ISIs surrounding that peak. Participants with both fluent and non-fluent aphasia showed maximal priming effects in the 250 ms ISI condition, and primed across a smaller range of ISIs than the control group. Conclusions Results suggest that individuals with aphasia have slowed automatic spreading activation, and impaired maintenance of activation over time, regardless of fluency classification. These findings have implications for understanding aphasic language impairment and for development of aphasia treatments designed directly address automatic language processes.

Discussion abounds in the literature as to whether aphasia is a deficit of linguistic competence or linguistic performance and, if it is a performance deficit, what are its precise mechanisms. Considerable evidence suggests that alteration of nonlinguistic factors can affect language performance in aphasia, a finding that raises questions about the modularity of language and the purity of linguistic mechanisms underlying the putative language deficits in persons with aphasia. This study investigated whether temporal stress plus additional cognitive demands placed on non-brain-damaged adults would produce aphasic-like performance on a picture naming task. Two groups of non-brain-damaged participants completed a picture naming task with additional cognitive demands (use of low frequency words and making semantic judgments about the stimuli). A control group performed this task at their own pace, and an experimental group was placed under time constraints. Naming errors were identified and coded by error type. Errors made by individuals with aphasia from a previous study (S. E. Kohn and H. Goodglass, 1985) were recoded with the coding system used in the present study and were then compared with the types of errors produced by the 2 non-brain-damaged groups. Results generally support the hypothesis that the language performance deficits seen in persons with aphasia exist on a continuum with the language performance of non-brain-damaged individuals. Some error type differences between groups warrant further investigation.