Contributions of Phonological and Semantic Short-Term Memory to Sentence Processing: Evidence from Two Cases of Closed Head Injury in Children

Abstract

This paper reports the short-term memory and sentence processing performance of two head-injured children who were approximately 10 years of age at the time of test. The two children were found to have similarly reduced memory span on a variety of short-term memory tasks relative to age-matched control children, but differing patterns of performance. One child showed reduced (or absent) effects of phonological variables, and the other showed reduced effects of semantic variables. A dissociation in their performance on sentence processing tasks was also observed, with one child showing preserved comprehension but impaired repetition, and the other child showing the reverse. The results are consistent with previous findings from brain-damaged adults supporting a multiple-components model of short-term memory in which phonological and semantic components play different roles in sentence processing. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, the phonological component did not appear to play a more important role in sentence comprehension for children than for adults.