Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Brain and Language 105 (2008) 185–198 www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l

Spoken-word processing in aphasia: Effects of item overlap and item repetition
Esther Janse
*
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands Accepted 16 October 2007 Available online 19 November 2007

Abstract Two studies were carried out to investigate the effects of presentation of primes showing partial (word-initial) or full overlap on processing of spoken target words. The first study investigated whether time compression would interfere with lexical processing so as to elicit aphasic-like performance in non-brain-damaged subjects. The second study was designed to compare effects of item overlap and item repetition in aphasic patients of different diagnostic types. Time compression did not interfere with lexical deactivation for the non-brain-damaged subjects. Furthermore, all aphasic patients showed immediate inhibition of co-activated candidates. These combined results show that deactivation is a fast process. Repetition effects, however, seem to arise only at the longer term in aphasic patients. Importantly, poor performance on diagnostic verbal STM tasks was shown to be related to lexical decision performance in both overlap and repetition conditions, which suggests a common underlying deficit. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Spoken-word processing; Aphasia; Inhibition; Lexical activation; Priming; Lexical deactivation; Repetition priming

1. Introduction During auditory word recognition, lexical word candidates compete for recognition and influence each other’s activation levels. Evidence for lateral inhibition between competing word candidates comes from interference effects found with high-similarity word-initial form-overlap between a prime (e.g., difficult) and a following target (e.g., diffident; cf. Monsell & Hirsh, 1998; Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). When the