An investigation of lexical ambiguity in Broca's aphasics using an auditory lexical priming technique.

Broca's aphasics and normal control subjects performed an auditory lexical decision task with stimulus pairs containing ambiguous (semantically-related) or unambiguous (unrelated) words as primes. Broca's aphasics, though having considerably longer latencies, produced a pattern of results similar to normal subjects; namely, faster reaction times for target words preceded by semantically related than unrelated words (i.e., semantic priming). These results do not support the hypothesis of BLUMSTEIN and colleagues that Broca's aphasics show a selective impairment in automatic processing associated with lexical access.