INVESTIGATING SEMANTIC MEMORY IMPAIRMENTS - THE CONTRIBUTION OF SEMANTIC PRIMING

The semantic priming task is a valuable tool in the investigation of s emantic memory impairments in patients with acquired disorders of lang uage. This is because priming performance reflects automatic or implic it access to semantic information, unlike most other tests of semantic knowledge, which rely on explicit, voluntary access. Priming results are important for two main reasons: First, normal priming results may be observed in patients who perform poorly on other semantic memory te sts, enabling us to distinguish between loss of, or damage to, informa tion in semantic memory, and Voluntary access to that information. Sec ond, we can investigate the detailed pattern of loss and preservation of different types of semantic information, by charting the priming ef fects for different kinds of words, and different kinds of semantic re lations between primes and targets. We discuss the use of the priming task in this context, and address some of the theoretical and methodol ogical criticisms that have been raised in connection with use of the priming task to address these issues. We then describe two recent stud ies in which we have employed semantic priming tasks, along with other more traditional, methods, to investigate specific questions about th e semantic memory deficits of three patients.