Major focus area

Speech Therapy -> Expressive Language

Short description

Priming is an implicit memory effect that the SLP uses in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. SLP uses semantic and/or lexical priming to improve word-finding deficits with patients (McGregor & Windsor, 1996).

Long description

Semantic Priming: In semantic priming, the prime and the target are from the same semantic category and share features. For example, the word dog is a semantic prime for wolf, because the two are both similar animals. Semantic priming is theorized to work because of spreading neural networks. When a person thinks of one item in a category, similar items are stimulated by the brain. Even if they are not words, morphemes can prime for complete words that include them. An example of this would be that the morpheme 'psych' can prime for the word 'psychology'.

Lexical Priming: In lexical priming the patient is taught to expect words to be in the company of other words [their collocations] and also expect words to appear in certain grammatical situations [their grammatical colligations] and in certain positions in text and discourse [their textual colligations]. Thus the collocation 'by the way' is primed for us to appear, most of the time, at the beginning of a statement.

Example: Picture of an elderly man walking with a cane. Prime: “this man likes to go walking” Target: walking stick/cane. Walking is a lexical prime for walking stick because we have “learned” or been primed that you can expect to see his two words together. Walking is also a semantic prime for both walking stick and cane.