NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE ACTIVATION APPROACH TO MEMORY - ACASE OF PHONOLOGICAL MEMORY DEFICIT

The present study is concerned with a brain-damaged patient, LR., who shows the typical ''selective short-term memory deficit'' pattern of p erformance. It is proposed that this performance pattern could be acco unted for without relying on a dual-store approach. In short-term seri al recall, the patient did not show normal phonological similarity eff ects but was highly influenced by the semantic and lexical properties of the items. A similar pattern was found in long-term recall tasks wh ere I.R. showed excellent recall of lexico-semantic material (words) b ut impaired recall of phonological information (non-words). These resu lts could be explained by the general disruption of a phonological mem ory with preserved semantic memory, without regard to the short-term/l ong-term memory distinction.