The role of phonological short-term memory in syntactic parsing: A case study

Abstract This paper presents the case of a patient with a phonological short-term memory (STM) impairment who shows a deficit of syntactic parsing restricted to the auditory modality. It will be argued that this selective deficit cannot be caused by a phonological discrimination problem. On the other hand, features of the patient's performance point to a memory problem as the main cause of the parsing difficulties. This pattern of results will be interpreted in light of the fact that other patients with a similar STM problem do not show an associated deficit of syntactic parsing. It is hypothesised that D.W.'s poor performance in the auditory modality is due to a combination of two problems: an impaired STM and an impaired syntactic parser. It will be argued that phonological STM plays an important role in sentence comprehension whenever the parser is not totally proficient in recovering syntactic information. This can happen during language acquisition/learning as well as because of brain damage.

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