Priming Effects on Verb Production as a Function of Semantic Richness in Persons with Aphasia

Objectives: The goal of this study was to explore the effect of priming verbs between individuals with aphasia and normal adults through a verb priming task. Methods: A total of 26 adults, including thirteen individuals with aphasia and thirteen normal adults with consistent age, years of education, and gender participated in this experiment. This study developed a verb priming task by referring to the task used in the research by Kim & Thompson (2004). After conducting the verb priming task, this study analyzed the priming verb computation rate and error types in each group. Results: The priming verb computation rate was significantly lower in the group of individuals with aphasia than in the normal adult group, and the priming rate of light verbs was significantly lower than that of heavy verbs. However, the correlation between group-verb type was not significant. The analysis of the error types of individuals with aphasia showed verb type conversion regardless of verb type. The ratio of major error responses was higher than correct responses in light verbs, while the ratio of correct responses was higher than major error responses in heavy verbs. Conclusion: This study implies that Korean language individuals with aphasia have more difficulties with computation in light verbs than in heavy verbs, which in a tendency also shown among normal adults and reflects the normal linguistic characteristics of the Korean language. In this study, the difficulties of light verb computation can be explained by the combination of ‘predicate noun+light verb’. The combination of ‘predicate noun+light verb’ became more difficult as nominal and proverbial characteristics of predicate nouns were added to the proverbial characteristics of light verbs.