The influence of syntactic and semantic information on picture-naming performance in aphasic patients

Abstract Two experiments are described investigating which aspects of the sentence completion prompt are requisite for enhancing the ability of aphasic subjects to retrieve picture names. Naming performance of eight aphasic subjects is assessed in response to sentence frames containing a semantically related word (sentence completions), semantically empty sentence frames (carrier phrases) and provision of semantic information alone (associate verbs). It was shown that, as a group, subjects demonstrated better naming performance in response to sentence completions containing a semantically related word than to semantically empty sentence frames or to verb associates. Consideration of response times provides evidence that the sentence completion condition facilitates subjects' access to picture names. Our results support the notion that it is the combination of syntactic and semantic variables that enhances naming.

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