title: The time-course of lexical activation during sentence comprehension in people with aphasia.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To investigate the time-course of processing of lexical items in auditorily presented canonical (subject-verb-object) constructions in young, neurologically unimpaired control participants and participants with left-hemisphere damage and agrammatic aphasia.
  
  
  METHODS
  A cross modal picture priming (CMPP) paradigm was used to test 114 control participants and 8 participants with agrammatic aphasia for priming of a lexical item (direct object noun) immediately after it is initially encountered in the ongoing auditory stream and at 3 additional time points at 400-ms intervals.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The control participants demonstrated immediate activation of the lexical item, followed by a rapid loss (decay). The participants with aphasia demonstrated delayed activation of the lexical item.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This evidence supports the hypothesis of a delay in lexical activation in people with agrammatic aphasia. The delay in lexical activation feeds syntactic processing too slowly, contributing to comprehension deficits in people with agrammatic aphasia.
authors.affiliation: San Diego State University, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ferrill
authors.forename: Tracy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Love
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Walenski
authors.forename: Lewis P
authors.initials: LP
authors.lastname: Shapiro
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000503:physiopathology*; D002544:Cerebral Infarction / Q000503:physiopathology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult