Syntactic processing of auditory and visual sentences in a learning‐disabled child: Relation to short‐term memory

Abstract

The nature of a short‐term memory deficit and its relation to syntactic processing were investigated in a learning‐disabled child. The child showed reduced short‐term memory span for both auditorily and visually presented lists. The short‐term memory deficit was attributed to a disruption of phonological storage on the basis of several lines of evidence: No phonological similarity effect was obtained for visual presentation, the recency effect was absent for auditory presentation, and memory was normal for item information but poor for order information. On several syntactic tests, the child showed normal performance for visual presentation but impaired performance for auditory presentation. The deficit for auditory presentation was most obvious for syntactically complex sentences. The child's normal performance for visual presentation suggests that phonological short‐term memory does not play a critical role in reading comprehension. For auditory presentation, we hypothesize that phonological short‐term ...