Contributions of semantic and phonological working memory to narrative language independent of single word production: Evidence from acute stroke

ABSTRACTNeuropsychological case studies have provided evidence that individuals with semantic, but not phonological, working memory (WM) deficits have difficulty producing phrases containing several content words. These findings supported the claim of a phrasal scope of planning at the grammatical formulation stage of production, where semantic WM supports the maintenance of lexical-semantic representations as they are inserted into slots in phrasal constituents. Recent narrative production results for individuals at the acute stage of stroke supported the role for semantic WM in phrasal elaboration while suggesting a role for phonological WM at a subsequent phonological encoding stage in supporting fluent, rapid speech. In the present study, we employed a larger participant sample while controlling for single word production abilities at semantic and phonological levels. Results confirmed the relations between semantic WM and phrasal elaboration whereas the relation between phonological WM and speech rate was eliminated. There was, however, evidence that both impaired phonological retrieval and restricted phonological WM were related to the tendency to produce short, highly frequent words such as pronouns rather than longer, less frequent words. Future research is needed to address whether the results relating to phonological WM depend on damage specific to an output rather than an input phonological capacity.