Articulatory and phonological deficits in short-term memory and their relation to syntactic processing

The relationships between sentence comprehension deficits and deficits in the articulatory or phonological components of short-term memory were investigated. Nonfluent agrammatic patients showed very poor comprehension of syntax while a group of nonfluent patients who were not agrammatic showed good comprehension, despite both groups showing similar degrees of deficits in an articulatory component of memory. The results imply that a disruption of inner rehearsal has little consequence for auditory sentence comprehension, and that the syntactic comprehension deficits of the agrammatic patients could not be attributed to their memory deficit. A patient with a disruption in phonological storage showed good comprehension for many sentences, but was impaired when a difficult syntactic structure was encountered early in a sentence. It was proposed that phonological storage serves to hold words in a phonological form when sentence processing cannot keep pace with sentence input. Although a role for phonological storage was postulated, the impressive degree of syntactic processing that could be carried out by patients with very restricted memory spans implies that there is little overlap between the memory systems disrupted in these patients and the working memory system presumed to be involved in sentence comprehension.