Semantic judgement errors in Parkinson's Disease: The role of priming

Recent studies of lexical-semantic performance errors in Parkinson's Disease have supported the hypothesis that faulty retrieval processes, rather than degraded representations, have the greatest potential to give rise to observed clinical symptoms. In this study, semantic priming is used to demonstrate that providing context to patients is essential for correctly processing semantic information. Successful resolution of lexical ambiguity in a model semantic system is demonstrated at high levels of lateral inhibition, in the presence of semantically related target words, by activating less-dominant target word senses. It was found that 15 epochs of priming were required for a reduction in observed response latency and the correct word sense to be selected (i.e., a complete reversal of symptoms).