LANGUAGE AND AUDITORY-VERBAL SHORT-TERM-MEMORY IMPAIRMENTS - EVIDENCEFOR COMMON UNDERLYING PROCESSES

We report an investigation of the short-term memory (STM) impairments of 15 aphasic subjects whose language profiles varied with respect to the relative involvement of lexical-semantic and phonological processe s. On the hypothesis that STM is dependent on capacities intrinsic to language processing, repetition span should vary in conjunction with l exical-semantic and phonological impairment: Specifically, when lexica l-semantic processing is impaired, phonological abilities provide prim ary support to span performance; when phonological processing is impai red, there should be increased reliance on lexical-semantic informatio n. Support for this hypothesis was provided by correlating measures of semantic and phonological abilities with effects of imageability and frequency on repetition performance, and with serial position effects in retrieval of phonemes within a word and words within a string. The data are discussed within the framework of an interactive activation m odel of language processing.