A deficit in the short-term retention of lexical-semantic information: forgetting words but remembering a story

This article examines the long-term memory of a patient, AB, who had previously been reported to have problems in the short-term retention of word meanings. The authors found that AB had a problem not only in the short-term but also in the long-term retention of lexical-semantic information. AB, however, had no problem in the long-term retention of other kinds of information (pictures, shapes, propositional information). This pattern of results was interpreted as evidence that lexical-semantic representations have their own specific memory resources that are involved in the retention of the corresponding representations across different time intervals (e.g., they are involved in short-term as well as long-term retention). Implications for models of memory are discussed.