Authors:

KNOTT, R., PATTERSON, K., HODGES, J.R.

Reference:

Year of publication:

2000

CBU number:

3867

Abstract:

We report results from investigations of auditory-verbal short-term memory (AVSTM) in a patient with progressive fluent anomic aphasia. Despite having apparently normal AVSTM as measured by digit span, FM was significantly impaired in immediate serial recall of short sequences of familiar words, and even in reproducing a single word after a filled delay of just a few seconds. In both tasks, unlike normal subjects, she produced numerous phonological errors, often consisting of phonological segments from intended target word concatenated with segments from other words in the stimulus sequence. Her success in these tasks was modulated (i) consistently by word frequency (high > low), (ii) inconsistently by word imageability (high > low) , and (iii) most dramatically by nameability': that is, FM was much more likely to reproduce a word correctly in AVSTM if it was a word that she could also produce successfully in picture-naming tasks. On the basis of these and additional experiments designed to exclude other interpretations, we conclude that AVSTM may be crucially supported by activation of the lexical phonological representations responsible for production of content words in speech.