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Can phonological and semantic short‐term memory be dissociated? Further evidence from landau‐kleffner syndrome

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02643290342000104

1464-0627

Steve Majerus, Martial Van der Linden, Martine Poncelet, Marie‐Noëlle Metz‐Lutz,

Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research

Recent studies have made a distinction between short‐term storage capacities for phonological information and short‐term storage capacities for lexico‐semantic information (R. Martin, Lesch, & Bartha, 1999). In this multiple case study, we tried to provide further evidence for the dissociability of phonological and lexico‐semantic short‐term memory (STM) components, by studying verbal STM in three patients who had recovered from Landau‐Kleffner syndrome. Furthermore, we explored to what extent apparent dissociations between phonological and lexico‐semantic STM could be related to underlying phonological and lexico‐semantic processing impairments. We found clear dissociations between phonological and lexico‐semantic STM measures in patients TG, JPH, and DC, whose performance was impaired in nonword immediate serial recall and in a rhyme probe task, while performance was normal for a category probe task. These patients also presented reduced phonological effects (word length, phonological similarity, phonotactic frequency) but normal lexico‐semantic effects (lexicality, word imageability, word frequency) in STM. Moreover, there were no systematic correspondencies between phonological and lexico‐semantic STM and phonological and lexico‐semantic processing impairments. Implications for current models of STM and language processing are discussed.