An examination of automatic versus strategic semantic priming effects in Broca's aphasia

This experiment examined the nature of automatic versus strategic priming effects in Broca's aphasia. Broca's aphasics, age-matched controls, and young controls participated in a visual pairwise lexical decision task in a 250 SOA condition. A neutral priming condition was included to measure the contribution of facilitatory and inhibitory influences to the overall priming effect. Unlike the young normal controls, the age-matched controls and the Broca's aphasics displayed inhibitory priming effects, indicating the use of strategic processing in this short SOA condition. The results suggest that automatic lexical processing is reduced in Broca's aphasia, and perhaps declines with normal ageing as well. Furthermore, they support the hypothesis that subjects will resort to the use of conscious strategies in the lexical decision task, even in short SOA conditions, if unable to process the stimuli automatically.