The role of phonological working memory in phonological alexia

Abstract

Patients with phonologic alexia show impaired pseudoword (PW) reading, and frequently are impaired in reading functors and words with affixes. Phonological alexia has been attributed to a disturbance in the orthography to phonology reading route. Alternatively, it has been hypothesized that the deficit is one of phonologic processing not specific to reading, consistent with the frequent concomitant impairment in PW repetition (Friedman, 1995). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of one aspect of phonologic processing, phonologic working memory (pWM), to the reading deficit in patients with phonological alexia. Specifically, we hypothesized that the greater the reading impairment, the greater impairment would be seen on a phonologic working memory task. Digit span and spatial span are often used to measure working memory; digit span purportedly measures phonologic working memory, and spatial span measures visuo-spatial working memory. In this study scores on digit and spatial span were compared to scores on word reading, pseudoword reading and pseudoword repetition.