Phonological short-term store, phonological processing and sentence comprehension: A neuropsychological case study

Abstract

Phonological processing and speech comprehension were investigated in a patient with left hemisphere damage and a grossly reduced auditory verbal span, attributed to a selective impairment of a phonological short-term store (Vallar & Baddeley, in press). Her phonological processing perfomance was well within the normal range as measured by phonological discrimination, the assignment of stress to words, and rhyme judgement. Comprehension of individual words and of short sentences was unaffected. However, the patient's comprehension of long sentences was defective, whether presented visually or auditorily, when preservation of the specific wording was essential for understanding. These results suggest a dissociation between the processes that perform phonological analysis of verbal information and a phonological short-term store, the latter being selectively impaired in the present case. The pattern of deficit observed in this case suggests that such a system may be useful for comprehending sentences, whenever the verbatim content has to be retained in order to extract meaning