# Implicit Structural Priming as a Treatment Component in Aphasia

> **NIH NIH R01** · PURDUE UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $658,423

## Abstract

Project Summary
Implicit Structural Priming as a Treatment Component in Aphasia
 Impaired message-to-structure mapping is at the heart of communication deficits in persons with
aphasia (PWA), resulting in impaired sentence production and comprehension. As of yet, the few
treatment options available for the mapping deficits involve explicit metacognitive training of sentence
production, yielding variable generalization and maintenance effects. Therefore, there remains a critical
need to identify interventions that successfully improve mapping abilities in PWA. This project
introduces implicit structural priming as a novel facilitator for language recovery in aphasia. Structural
priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to
a previously experienced (“prime”) sentence, has been ubiquitously observed across decades of
psycholinguistic research and viewed as a powerful tool to study the processes of implicit language
learning. Preliminary studies reported in this application suggest that structural priming can be applied
to PWA and might produce positive, enduring language recovery in PWA. The planned studies seek to
test the hypothesis that implicit structural priming alters the central syntactic system in PWA, creating
lasting and generalized improvements in both language production and comprehension. Aim 1 will
determine the extent to which different manipulations of structural priming conditions modulate
immediate and long-term improvement in sentence production. We integrate multiple theories of
language learning and apply them to make predictions about the trajectory of priming-induced syntactic
learning in PWA. In Aim 2, using a set of eyetracking sentence comprehension tasks, we investigate
whether the effects of structural priming in production generalize to off-line (accuracy) and on-line (eye
fixations) sentence comprehension and determine what learning conditions result in greater cross-
modality generalization. In Aim 3, we develop and establish Phase I efficacy data of an implicit
structural priming treatment, incorporating the crucial learning conditions supporting maximal retention
from Aims 1 and 2. The outcomes of this work will lead to identification of a model of language
(re-)learning in aphasia and the development of a novel treatment that capitalizes on the benefits of
the implicit learning mechanisms underlying structural priming.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10445227
- **Project number:** 5R01DC019129-02
- **Recipient organization:** PURDUE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Jiyeon Lee
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $658,423
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-08-01 → 2026-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10445227

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10445227, Implicit Structural Priming as a Treatment Component in Aphasia (5R01DC019129-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10445227. Licensed CC0.

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