scholarly journals Verbal Short-Term Memory and Motor Speech Processes in Broca’s Aphasia

1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Goerlich ◽  
I. Daum ◽  
I. Hertrich ◽  
H. Ackermann

The present study investigated the relationship between verbal short-term memory and motor speech processes in healthy control subjects and five patients suffering from Broca's aphasia. Control subjects showed a phonological similarity effect, a word length effect and an articulatory suppression effect, supporting the hypothesis of a phonological store and an articulatory loop component of short-term memory. A similar effect of phonological similarity was observed in the aphasic patients, while the effects of word length and articulatory suppression were reduced. In control subjects, measures of short-term memory were correlated to measures of motor speech rate only if speech rate was assessed in more complex conditions (such as sentence rather than syllable repetition). There was also evidence of an association of speech impairment and short-term memory deficits in the aphasic patients.

1989 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. V. M. Bishop ◽  
J. Robson

In normal adults, concurrent articulation impairs short-term memory, abolishing both the phonological similarity effect and the word length effect when visual presentation is used. It also interferes with ability to judge whether visually presented words rhyme. It is generally assumed that concurrent articulation impairs performance because it prevents people from recoding material into an articulatory form. If this is the explanation, then individuals who are congenitally speechless (anarthric) or speech-impaired (dysarthric) should show the same impairments as normal individuals who are concurrently articulating—i.e. they should have reduced memory spans, fail to show word length and phonological similarity effects in short-term memory, and find rhyme judgement difficult. These predictions were tested in a study of 48 cerebral palsied individuals: 12 anarthric, 12 dysarthric, and 24 controls individually matched to the speech-impaired subjects. There was no impairment of memory span in speech-impaired subjects, who showed normal phonological similarity and word-length effects in short-term memory. Speech-impaired subjects did not differ from their controls in ability to tell whether names of pairs of pictures rhymed. These results challenge the notion that “articulatory coding” is implicated in short-term memory and rhyme judgement and suggests that processes such as rehearsal and phonemic segmentation involve generation of a more abstract central phonological code.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Williams ◽  
Dermot M. Bowler ◽  
Christopher Jarrold

AbstractEvidence regarding the use of inner speech by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is equivocal. To clarify this issue, the current study employed multiple techniques and tasks used across several previous studies. In Experiment 1, participants with and without ASD showed highly similar patterns and levels of serial recall for visually presented stimuli. Both groups were significantly affected by the phonological similarity of items to be recalled, indicating that visual material was spontaneously recoded into a verbal form. Confirming that short-term memory is typically verbally mediated among the majority of people with ASD, recall performance among both groups declined substantially when inner speech use was prevented by the imposition of articulatory suppression during the presentation of stimuli. In Experiment 2, planning performance on a tower of London task was substantially detrimentally affected by articulatory suppression among comparison participants, but not among participants with ASD. This suggests that planning is not verbally mediated in ASD. It is important that the extent to which articulatory suppression affected planning among participants with ASD was uniquely associated with the degree of their observed and self-reported communication impairments. This confirms a link between interpersonal communication with others and intrapersonal communication with self as a means of higher order problem solving.


1996 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 398-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Boyle ◽  
Veronika Coltheart

The effects of irrelevant sounds on reading comprehension and short-term memory were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, adults judged the acceptability of written sentences during irrelevent speech, accompanied and unaccompanied singing, instrumental music, and in silence. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity: Simple sentences contained a right-branching relative clause ( The applause pleased the woman that gave the speech) and syntactically complex sentences included a centre-embedded relative clause ( The hay that the farmer stored fed the hungry animals). Unacceptable sentences either sounded acceptable ( The dog chased the cat that eight up all his food) or did not ( The man praised the child that sight up his spinach). Decision accuracy was impaired by syntactic complexity but not by irrelevant sounds. Phonological coding was indicated by increased errors on unacceptable sentences that sounded correct. These error rates were unaffected by irrelevant sounds. Experiment 2 examined effects of irrelevant sounds on ordered recall of phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists. Phonological similarity impaired recall. Irrelevant speech reduced recall but did not interact with phonological similarity. The results of these experiments question assumptions about the relationship between speech input and phonological coding in reading and the short-term store.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (7) ◽  
pp. 1210-1219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Thomson ◽  
Ulla Richardson ◽  
Usha Goswami

2003 ◽  
Vol 56 (6) ◽  
pp. 929-954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winston D. Goh ◽  
David B. Pisoni

Current theories and models of the structural organization of verbal short-term memory are primarily based on evidence obtained from manipulations of features inherent in the short-term traces of the presented stimuli, such as phonological similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether properties of the stimuli that are not inherent in the short-term traces of spoken words would affect performance in an immediate memory span task. We studied the lexical neighbourhood properties of the stimulus items, which are based on the structure and organization of words in the mental lexicon. The experiments manipulated lexical competition by varying the phonological neighbourhood structure (i.e., neighbourhood density and neighbourhood frequency) of the words on a test list while controlling for word frequency and intra-set phonological similarity (family size). Immediate memory span for spoken words was measured under repeated and nonrepeated sampling procedures. The results demonstrated that lexical competition only emerged when a nonrepeated sampling procedure was used and the participants had to access new words from their lexicons. These findings were not dependent on individual differences in short-term memory capacity. Additional results showed that the lexical competition effects did not interact with proactive interference. Analyses of error patterns indicated that item-type errors, but not positional errors, were influenced by the lexical attributes of the stimulus items. These results complement and extend previous findings that have argued for separate contributions of long-term knowledge and short-term memory rehearsal processes in immediate verbal serial recall tasks.


1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 578-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Swinney ◽  
Orlando L. Taylor

A nonverbal short-term memory (STM) recognition task was administered to eight matched pairs of normal and aphasic subjects. Computer-controlled apparatus presented a stimulus list of two, four, and six digits, followed by a single digit, and recorded the amount of time required for subjects to indicate whether the single digit was In or Out of the stimulus list. Response latencies were significantly slower for aphasic than for control subjects. Analysis of response latencies as a function of list length revealed that both groups displayed linear increases, suggesting a serial search process in STM. Control subjects displayed parallel increases for both In and Out functions, while aphasic subjects displayed slopes for Out functions twice the magnitude of those for In functions. This finding indicated an exhaustive search in control subjects and a self-terminating search in aphasic subjects. These qualitative and quantitative differences in STM have potential correlates with differences in language comprehension between these populations.


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