Dissociable components of phonological and lexical-semantic short-term memory and their relation to impaired word production in aphasia.

This study assesses the dissociability of phonological and lexical-semantic short-term memory (STM) in two aphasic patients, B.N. and T.M., and explores the relationship between their STM deficits and their word production impairment. Picture naming performance suggests phonological language production impairment in B.N. and lexical-semantic language production impairment in T.M. On STM tasks, B.N. presented phonological STM impairment with preserved lexical-semantic STM, while T.M. presented the reverse profile. These results reveal a double dissociation between phonological and lexical-semantic STM capacities and suggest that our patients' STM impairment may be selectively related to their language production deficits.