The effect of sentence boundaries upon aphasic patients' immediate memory for connected speech

Memory for the terminal portion of connected speech was investigated in Broca's, Wernicke's and Conduction aphasic patients. A multiple choice probe recognition paradigm was employed so that the results would not be contaminated by expressive speech errors. The effects on retention performance of sentence boundaries and the number of words intervening between target word presentation and test were studied. The different aphasic groups showed similar patterns of performance. Sentence boundaries had no effect on retention but more errors were produced with seven than with four words intervening between presentation and test. Errors were classified as semantic, phonemic or unrelated and in all conditions of the experiment semantic confusion errors predominated. It was argued that there was no evidence that the aphasic patients retained the last heard sentence in a superficial form in short-term memory.