Study on auditory semantic priming effects in patients with aphasia

Abstract

Objective To explore the characteristics of semantic priming effects in Chinese words with different association strength in patients with aphasia by auditory stimulation.Method Stimulus-response word pairs with different association strength including strong,moderate,weak,and no association categories were chosen from word association thesaurus as experiment materials.Both patients with aphasia(n=11)and normal subjects (n=16)were requested to finish an auditory lexical decision task for target words.Semantic priming effects were investigated by means of measuring reaction time(RT)and error rate of each word-pair.Results In patients with aphasia and normal subjects,the mean RTs were significantly shorter in strong,moderate and weak association strength words than in no association strength words(patients with aphasia(1270.20±47.70)ms,(1340.50±266.25)ms,(1429.70±317.07)ms vs(1549.00±325.87)ms,P＜0.05 and normal subjects(1140.2±274.48)ms,(1196.50±284.06)ms,(1262.10±274.31)ms vs(1391.20±315.68)ms,P＜0.05).In strong,moderate,and no association strength words,the mean RTs were no significant differences between two groups.In the weak association strength words,mean RTs were significantly longer in patients with aphasia than in normal subjects((1429.70±317.07)ms vs(1262.10±274.31)ms,P＜0.05).In two groups,mean error rates were significantly less in strong,moderate and weak association strength words than in no association strength words(patients with aphasia:7.73±6.07,4.55±7.23,6.82±8.15 vs 14.09±12.41,P＜0.05 and normal subjects:3.44±4.37,2.81±3.64,5.31±5.91 vs 10.94±11.14,P＜0.05).However,in strong association strength words,mean error rates were significantly higher in patients with aphasia than in normal subjects(7.73±6.07 vs 3.44±4.37,P＜0.05).In moderate,weak and no association strength words,there were no significant differences between two groups.Conclusion The patients with aphasia follow gradient of the association strength words like normal subjects and have semantic priming effects in the strong,moderate association strength words. Key words: Association strength; Semantic priming; Aphasia; Reaction time