SEMANTIC PRIMING IN BROCAS APHASICS AT A SHORT SOA - NO SUPPORT FOR AN AUTOMATIC ACCESS DEFICIT

This study tests the recent claim that Broca's aphasics are impaired i n automatic lexical access, including the retrieval of word meaning. S ubjects are required to perform a lexical decision on visually present ed prime target pairs. Half of the word targets are preceded by a rela ted word, half by an unrelated word. Primes and targets are presented with a long stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA) of 1400 msec and with a sh ort SOA of 300 msec. Normal priming effects are observed in Broca's ap hasics for both SOAs. This result is discussed in the context of the c laim that Broca's aphasics suffer from an impairment in the automatic access of lexical-semantic information. It is argued that none of the current priming studies provides evidence supporting this claim, since with short SOAs priming effects have been reliably obtained in Broca' s aphasics. The results are more compatible with the claim that in man y Broca's aphasics the functional locus of their comprehension deficit is at the level of postlexical integration processes. (C) 1997 Academ ic Press