APHASIC DISORDERS OF SYNTACTIC COMPREHENSION AND WORKING-MEMORY CAPACITY

Miyake, Carpenter, and Just (1994) present results of two sentence com prehension experiments using RSVP in normal subjects, which they say s imulate important features of aphasic patients' comprehension of synta ctic structures. On this basis, they claim that normal and aphasic sub jects' performance represents a continuum of limitations in working me mory capacity. In this paper, we argue that the Miyake et al. data do not resemble the performance of aphasic patients in crucial respects, and that their results provide evidence for the opposite conclusion-na mely, that the processing resource system that underlies syntactic pro cessing and that is affected in aphasia is substantially separate from the one used for other verbal tasks, such as reasoning and problem so lving, which is tested in tasks such as the Daneman and Carpenter (198 0) reading span task.