Structural priming from production to comprehension in aphasia

Abstract

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

TelePriming sentence production in aphasia

“…Additionally, the current findings suggest that the alignment process of message-sentence structure mappings in an interactive language task remains preserved in aphasia, extending the burgeoning evidence of the positive effects of structural priming in PWA (for production: Saffran and Martin, 1997;Hartsuiker and Kolk, 1998;Cho-Reyes et al, 2016;Yan et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2019;Man et al, 2019;van Boxtel et al, 2023;for comprehension: Lee et al, 2019;Keen and Lee, 2022). Implicit structural priming is effective in facilitating sentence processing in PWA across different linguistic representations (syntactic, lexical), task types (monologue, dialogue), and delivery modes (in-person, TelePriming).…”

“…After hearing or repeating prime sentences, PWA are able to produce sentences that they could not produce otherwise more frequently (Saffran and Martin, 1997;Hartsuiker and Kolk, 1998;Yan et al, 2018), and these priming effects persist over intervening filler utterances (Cho-Reyes et al, 2016;Lee et al, 2019;Man et al, 2019). Priming experience in the production modality shapes the ways in which PWA interpret subsequent syntactically ambiguous sentences, suggesting that structural priming creates enduring changes in the central syntactic system (Keen and Lee, 2022). In a recent eyetracking structural priming study, van Boxtel and colleagues found that a group of PWA showed cumulative improvement in the production accuracy of passive sentences and the use of an advanced sentence planning strategy, even when they failed to show significant immediate priming effects (van Boxtel et al, 2023).…”