Normal Population And In Patients With Aphasia Auditory Semantic Priming Effect

Objective:To explore the characteristics of semantic priming effects and repetition effects in Chinese words with different association strength between young and old adults by auditory stimulation.Method:Stimulus-response word pairs with different association strength including strong, moderate, weak, and no association categories were chosen from word association thesaurus as experiment materials. Both young (n=20) and old (n=20) adults were requested to finish an auditory lexical decision task for target words. Semantic priming effects and repetition effects were investigated by means of measuring reaction time (RT) and error rate of each word-pair.Results:In young and old adults, the mean RTs in strong, moderate and weak association strength words were significantly shorter than that in no association strength words (p<0.05). In same association strength words, the mean RTs in old adults were significantly longer than that in young adults (p<0.05).The mean RTs in the repetition test, the second test was significantly shorter than the first time (p<0.05), There were not significantly differences in repetition effects between young and old adults.Conclusion:The auditory semantic priming effects are influenced by word-pairs with different association strength and age which don't affect the repetition effects. The results suggest that speech therapy require choosing vocabularies with associated strength in the light of different ages as training materials, and old adults can acquire the same learning effects by frequent repetitive training as young adults. Objective:To explore the characteristics of semantic priming effects in Chinese words with different association strength in aphasia patients by auditory stimulation.Method:Stimulus-response word pairs with different association strength including strong, moderate, weak, and no association categories were chosen from word association thesaurus as experiment materials. Both aphasia patients (n=11) and control (n=16) were requested to finish an auditory lexical decision task for target words. Semantic priming effects were investigated by means of measuring reaction time (RT) and error rate of each word-pair.Results:In aphasia patients and control, the mean RTs in strong, moderate and weak association strength words were significantly shorter than that in no association strength words (p<0.05); In strong, moderate, and no association strength words, the mean RTs in aphasia patients and control were no significantly differences; but mean RTs in the weak association strength words, aphasia patients were longer than the control (p<0.05). In aphasia patients and control, mean error rates in strong, moderate and weak association strength words were significantly less than that in no association strength words (p<0.05); however, in strong association strength words, mean error rates of aphasia patients were higher than the control(p<0.05), in moderate, weak and no association strength words ,there were no significantly differences. Conclusion:The aphasia patients follow the control gradient of the association strength words, and the test revealed the presence of semantic priming effects in the strong, moderate association strength words. The results suggest that speech therapy require choosing vocabularies with strong and moderate associated strength words as training materials, by the auditory association stimulus to train, aphasia patients could achieve the expectation of rehabilitation purpose, so as to realize the personal demand for speech therapy.