SYMPOSIUM: ACTIVATING WORDS IN THE BRAIN: INTEGRATING NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 1. Activating Words in the Brain: Integrating Neuropsychology and Psycholinguistics

Throughout the field of neuropsychology, evidence for complex implicit competence has been documented in patients with neurological damage and limited linguistic, attentional, or mnemonic performance. Such results suggest that systems are activated and carrying out their functions even though this information is no longer available for conscious planning and problem solving. One example of this sort of competence in the face of impaired behavior is lexical and semantic priming in neurological populations. Results of this sort have been widely reported but their neurological implications and relation to psycholinguistic models of processing have not been made clear. The goal of this symposium is to examine the locus of both preserved and disturbed facilitation from the level of form represented by repetition priming to the level of conceptual knowledge represented by pictures. At the periphery , Dr. Swick's studies of patients with left and right temporal parietal le-sions demonstrate intact repetition priming for words, but an impairment in repetition priming of nonwords in left lesioned patients. Prior work has shown that both word and nonword repetition priming were intact in patients with frontal lobe damage. She hypothesizes that this may be related to a defective phonological store in the left temporal parietal patients which is crucial to establishing a stable representation of the nonword stimuli. Drs. Baynes and Dronkers have examined the hemispheric organization and integration of lexical-semantic and conceptual knowledge by studying facilitation of words and pictures in normal controls, focal lesion patients and split-brain subjects. Facilitation effects indicate that both hemispheres support a