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Objectives: This article aimed to describe a new experience activated inside of a more general psychological approach for patients who underwent cardiac surgery intervention., Material and Methods: The first 100 patients taking part to the groups were subjected to a questionnaire in order to evaluate the satisfaction degree of the meeting., Results: The questionnaire results, showed on the whole a good rating of the meeting. In addition to quantitative results, we express and discuss in this paper some considerations concerning the obtained results., Conclusions: Preliminary data analysis show that volunteers previously submitted to cardiac surgery seem to offer an important contribution to the psychological support of patients recently undergone cardiac surgery.

We evaluated whether lexical selection in speech production is affected by word frequency by means of two experiments. In Experiment 1 participants named pictures using utterances with the structure "pronoun + verb + adjective". In Experiment 2 participants had to perform a gender decision task on the same pictures. Access to the noun's grammatical gender is needed in both tasks, and therefore lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is required. However, retrieval of the phonological properties (lexeme retrieval) of the referent noun is not needed to perform the tasks. In both experiments we observed faster latencies for high-frequency pictures than for low-frequency pictures. This frequency effect was stable over four repetitions of the stimuli. Our results suggest that lexical selection (lemma retrieval) is sensitive to word frequency. This interpretation runs against the hypothesis that a word's frequency exerts its effects only at the level at which the phonological properties of words are retrieved.