Syntactic priming in broca's aphasics: Evidence for slow activation

Abstract

Recently, several investigators have suggested that the parsing system of Broca's aphasics is affected by a resource limitation which could involve (1) a reduction in the size of a syntactic buffer, (2) slow activation of syntactic information, or (3) fast decay of syntactic information. The results of a syntactic-priming experiment, which varied the SOA (stimulus- onset asynchrony: 300, 700 and 1100 ms) between a prime fragment and target presented for lexical decision, provided support for the slow-activation hypothesis. A group of 13 age-matched controls showed syntactic priming, that is, significantly faster response times in the grammatical condition than in the ungrammatical condition, at all three SOAs. A group of 13 Broca's aphasics, on the other hand, showed significant syntactic priming only at the 110 ms SOA.