Abstract
We report an investigation of phonological priming of a picture naming task in an anomic aphasic, PB, using caffeine as a pharmacological manipulation. We compare her results to controls on a similar paradigm testing the hypothesis that qualitative results in controls would carry over to the damaged brain demonstrating a “graceful degradation” in performance. When primed with words phonologically related to a target, PB made more word retrieval failures on caffeine as a function of related primes (controls make fewer) and fewer word retrieval failures as a function of unrelated primes (controls make more). The results thus supported the rejection of the hypothesis and we conclude that the use of the pharmacological manipulation provides a sensitive test for the graceful degradation of function.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Marilena Serio and Alberta Lunardelli for help with the neuropsychological testing.
Notes
*The first two authors contributed equally to this study.
1To clarify that her word retrieval failure was an actual TOT, during the neuropsychological assessment, PB showed knowledge of some phonological information of the word she was in the TOT for; guessing the number of syllables correctly 67% of the time and initial letters 60% of the time. She was not asked for information about the word during the main study.