Lexical semantic activation in persons with Aphasia

Authors

  • Abhishek B. P. Department of Speech Language Sciences, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, Karnataka, India
  • Darshan H. S. Department of Speech Language Pathology, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, Karnataka, India

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37591/rrjon.v7i3.180

Abstract

Lexical semantic activation (LSA) is defined as retrieval of the most appropriate word from the lexicon. LSA is accomplished through three steps, conceptual activation, lexical node activation and phoneme retrieval and can be tested through a variety of tasks including priming task. LSA is found to be defective in persons with aphasia; it can be manifested as storage deficit or access deficit. Storage deficit is a condition where there is a total degradation of items in the lexicon and access deficits, and on the other hand is a condition where the items in the lexicon are intact but access to these items is restricted. Persons with access deficits can have problems concerning to lexical node activation or phoneme retrieval and can be tapped through semantic judgment and lexical decision task respectively. The present study aimed to study lexical semantic activation in persons with Broca’s aphasia, anomic aphasia and neurologically healthy individuals. Lexical decision task and semantic judgement task was administered on the participants. Statistically significant difference was seen for persons with Broca’s aphasia and persons with anomic aphasia. No difference was seen for neurologically healthy individuals. Persons with Broca’s aphasia performed well on semantic judgement indicating that the lexical node activation would be intact while persons with anomic aphasia performed well on lexical decision task, showing that the phonological encoding was effective. The findings also pin pointed the defective mechanisms in these variants of aphasia.


Keywords: Phoneme encoding deficit, lexical activation deficits, Aphasia

Cite this Article
Abhishek B.P, Darshan H.S. Lexical Semantic Activation in Persons with Aphasia. Research and Reviews: Journal of Neuroscience. 2017; 7(3): 20–25p.


Downloads

Published

2018-03-26

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 3 (2017)

Section

Articles

License

Declaration and Copyright Transfer Form

(to be completed by authors)

I/ We, the undersigned author(s) of the submitted manuscript, hereby declare, that the above manuscript which is submitted for publication in the STM Journals(s), is not published already in part or whole (except in the form of abstract) in any journal or magazine for private or public circulation, and, is not under consideration of publication elsewhere.

  • I/We will not withdraw the manuscript after 1 week of submission as I have read the Author Guidelines and will adhere to the guidelines.
  • I/We Author(s ) have niether given nor will give this manuscript elsewhere for publishing after submitting in STM Journal(s).
  • I/ We have read the original version of the manuscript and am/ are responsible for the thought contents embodied in it. The work dealt in the manuscript is my/ our own, and my/ our individual contribution to this work is significant enough to qualify for authorship.
  •  I/We also agree to the authorship of the article in the following order:

Author’s name                                    

 

1. ________________

2. ________________

3. ________________

4. ________________

 

We  Author(s) tick this box and would request you to consider it as our signature as we agree to the terms of this Copyright Notice, which will apply to this submission if and when it is published by this journal.