ABSTRACT WORD DEFICITS IN APHASIA - EVIDENCE FROM SEMANTIC PRIMING

J.G. and D.E. are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have select ive problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semant ic deficit for abstract words. The authors show that this is not the c ase by means of a semantic priming task, which tests for implicit know ledge of the meanings of abstract and concrete words. Spoken word pair s that were either abstract or concrete synonyms (e.g., street-road or luck-chance) were presented, and it was found that both patients show ed priming for the abstract and concrete pairs. The researchers follow ed up by asking the patients to produce definitions to spoken abstract and concrete words; these definitions were also normal. The priming a nd definition data suggest that the semantic representations of abstra ct words in these patients were relatively unimpaired. The researchers found that the patients have problems only with spoken abstract words in just those tasks where normal controls also have difficulty. In co ntrast, they clearly have deficits in reading abstract words aloud, wh ich may be due to problems with output phonology. The implications of these data for claims concerning hemispheric differences in the repres entation of abstract and concrete words are discussed.