THE IMPACT OF SEMANTIC MEMORY LOSS ON PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Three patients with semantic dementia, involving progressive deteriora tion of semantic memory, performed immediate serial recall of short se quences of familiar words. On the basis of their performance in other tasks of word comprehension and production, the stimuli were selected individually for each patient as either known or unknown words. All pa tients showed a marked advantage in recall of known as compared to fam iliar but now unknown words. Errors consisted primarily of incorrect c ombinations of correct phoneme sequences in the stimulus string, with a large number of errors preserving onset/rime syllable structure (e.g ., mint, rug reproduced as ''rint, mug''). Discussion focuses on the i mplication of these errors for the structure of phonological represent ations, and in particular on a hypothesis that meaning plays a crucial role in binding the elements of phonological word forms.