Observations on the speech processing capabilities of an amnesic patient: Several aspects of H.M.'s language function

Abstract

This report describes several aspects of the language function of Scoville's patient, H.M., who suffers from a severe amnesic syndrome ( Milner et al. [2]). Although H.M.'s ability to detect various kinds of linguistic ambiguity appears essentially normal, his performance on a linguistic task involving the ongoing perceptual segmentation of speech is not. Often H.M. was unable to perform properly the speech task and the nature of his errors reveals that the constituent structure clause constitutes the functional unit in his short-term memory for linguistic material.