Lexical Access in individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury

Abstract

Lexical access can be assessed by employing several tasks like naming, priming, recall etc. Naming and priming tasks is known to oversimplify the mechanisms involved in lexical access and the recall is assumed to add more cognitive load to the participants. Recall is generally better for semantically related stimulus set compared to unrelated set as the former is known is exert facilitation. The study was carried out with the aim of assessing lexical access in grounds of facilitation and inhibition in neuro typical participants and individuals with traumatic brain injury. 10 participants with TBI (group 1) and 10 neuro typical participants were enrolled for the study. The participants were asked to recall string of related (semantically related and phonemically related) and unrelated words (semantically unrelated and phonemically unrelated). Participants with TBI performed well on unrelated stimulus showing that related stimulus would result in more intrusion and confusions in them while neuro typical participants performed better for related stimulus as it induced facilitation.

Keywords: Inhibition, Facilitation, Serial Recall