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Lexical ambiguity resolution as a function of working memory: eye-tracking data from agrammatic and healthy individuals
Linguistic problems of individuals with agrammatic aphasia are not solely restricted to the grammatical domain: a considerable delay in lexical processing was also found in this clinical population (Prather et al., 1997). It was suggested that language processing abilities of aphasic individuals is predictable from their working memory (WM) capacities (Caspari et al., 1998; Friedmann & Gvion, 2003; Wright & Fergadiotos, 2012), however experimental evidence for that is still sparse.
The goal of the present study was to investigate the time course of lexical ambiguity resolution in healthy individuals and patients with agrammatism as a function of their WM span. We hypothesized that patients’ poorer than overall normal performance could at least partly be explained by their reduced WM capacities. Specifically, patients and healthy low WM span individuals were expected to demonstrate similar processing strategies.