Discourse priming of homophones in individuals with dominant nonthalamic subcortical lesions, cortical lesions and Parkinson's disease

An on-line priming experiment was used to investigate discourse-level proce ssing in four matched groups of subjects: individuals with nonthalamic subc ortical lesions (NSL) (n=10), normal control subjects (n=10), subjects with Parkinson's disease (PD) (n=10), and subjects with cortical lesions (n=10) . Subjects listened to paragraphs that ended in lexical ambiguities, and th en made speeded lexical decisions on visual letter strings that were: nonwo rds, matched control words, contextually appropriate associates of the lexi cal ambiguity, contextually inappropriate associates of the ambiguity, and inferences (representing information which could be drawn from the paragrap hs but was not explicitly stated). Targets were presented at an interstimul us interval (ISI) of 0 or 1000 ms. NSL and PD subjects demonstrated priming for appropriate and inappropriate associates at the short ISL similar to c ontrol subjects and cortical lesion subjects, but were unable to demonstrat e selective priming of the appropriate associate and inference words at the long ISI. These results imply intact automatic lexical processing and a br eakdown in discourse-based meaning selection and inference development via attentional/strategic mechanisms.