CONSEQUENCES OF A MOTOR PROGRAMMING DEFICIT FOR REHEARSAL AND WRITTENSENTENCE COMPREHENSION

The role of central motor processes in rehearsal was investigated by s tudying a brain-damaged patient with a severe articulatory impairment. Evidence is presented that his articulatory impairment is due to a di sruption of motor programming rather than to peripheral muscle weaknes s. Despite his motor programming deficit, the patient showed normal au ditory span and evidence of rehearsal for auditorily presented sequenc es of words. For visual presentation, span was reduced and there was n o evidence of rehearsal. Also, the patient showed excellent sentence c omprehension for syntactically complex sentences for both auditory and visual presentation. The results imply that central motor processes a re not critical for normal short-term memory, at least for auditory pr esentation, and that reading comprehension does not depend on inner re hearsal.