The effect of sentence priming on picture naming was investigated across the lifespan, from age 3 to 87 years. Names that are normally acquired before 3 years of age were presented in auditory contexts that were semantically congruent, incongruent, or neutral in relation to each picture and its name. Sentential priming was present at all age levels. Facilitation (neutral vs. congruent) was significant by 4 years of age and did not vary significantly with age. Interference (incongruent vs. neutral) was significant at all age levels, but changed nonmonotonically with age (largest in the youngest children, stable from young adulthood through age 70, with a small increase in the oldest participants). We conclude that picture naming is a useful tool for the investigation of sentential priming effects across the lifespan and that it can reveal potentially interesting developmental changes in the effects of sentential context on word retrieval.The terms language acquisition and language loss have been used to describe changes in language ability at opposite ends of the human lifespan. These terms imply discrete moments of gain or loss, with knowledge held in a constant and unchanging form across the intervening years. And yet, we know that there are continuous changes throughout the lifespan in the native speaker's ability to access and deploy this knowledge. To increase our understanding of the mechanisms responsible for this kind of developmental change, we need methods that are sensitive to variations in the timing of language use, holding linguistic knowledge constant. In the present study, we explore picture naming in a sentence context as a measure oflexical access, in subjects from 3 to 87 years ofage. Our focus is on developmental changes in the time taken by speakers to access picture names, which were words usually acquired (in the discrete and static sense) by 30 months of age.The procedure in this study was a variant of picturenaming methods that have been used by other investigators (e.g., Griffin & Bock, 1998;Potter, Kroll, Yachzel, Carpenter, & Sherman, 1986), with children as well as adults (Kail & Leonard, 1986), but it was modified for use over a broader age range than any tested before. A substantial1iterature shows that single-word contexts (visual or auditory) can facilitate or interfere with picture-naming and/or picture-viewing times (for reviews, see Duchek, Balota, Faust, & Ferraro, 1995;Glaser, 1992;Humphreys, Lloyd-Jones, & Fias, 1995;Levelt, 1992; Wheeldon & Monsell, 1994). Potter and colleagues have shown that at the sentence level, naming times are reliably faster when the picture represents a good continuation of a visual sentence context (Potter & Faulconer, 1975;Potter et al., 1986; see also Gernsbacher, 1990, for effects of context on picture-viewing times). Our own ongoing studies with young adults show that picture naming yields robust phrasal and/or sentential priming effects (Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico,
Previous research suggests that English Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics retain sensitivity to pragmatic factors governing forms of reference, in particular the ability to choose lexical expressions that convey givenness and newness of information. The present study investigates the generality of this phenomenon across patients and language types. Normal and aphasic speakers of English, German, and Italian described nine picture triplets in which one element varied while the others remained constant. Dependent variables included lexicalization versus ellipsis, pronominalization, and definite and indefinite article use. For a subset of German and Italian patients, data were compared to performance in a biographical interview. Results indicate that (a) the pragmatics of reference are preserved in both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, despite syndrome-specific problems in retrieving content words and/or closed-class grammatical elements, and (b) certain language-specific patterns of reference are also preserved, including crosslinguistic differences in subject omission. Differences between picture description and the biographical interview reinforce this conclusion. Evidence for the preservation of pragmatics in aphasis is not surprising in its own right, but evidence for the sparing of language-specific relations among pragmatic, lexical, and morphosyntactic patterns can be used to argue against any strong view of grammatical impairment as a disconnection syndrome and/or a loss of grammatical competence. Instead, these data support theories in which grammatical impairment is viewed as a performance deficit.
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