The relationship between sentence comprehension and short term phonological memory in aphasia

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to study the relationship between sentence comprehension and short term phonological memory capacity (STPM) in aphasia, according to the comprehension restricted by storage capacity (CRC) model. The first study shows that STPM is in direct relationship with complex sentence comprehension, according to the span group. The second study demonstrates that when sentences are syntactically simple, even the lower span group has a comparable performance to that of normal. These results are in line with the CRC model and highlight the direct relationship between syntactic comprehension and STPM. It is claimed that the advantage of such models is that they do not assume impairment to a syntactic specific mechanism but rather reduction of a general capacity, as STPM, to explain sentence comprehension.on/xa