Misperception in sentences but not in words: Speech perception and the phonological buffer.
We report two case studies of aphasic patients with a working-memory impairment due to reduced storage in the phonological buffer. The two patients display excellent performance in phonological discrimination tasks as long as the tasks do not involve a memory load. We then show that their performance drops when they have to maintain fine-grained phonological information for sentence comprehension: They are impaired at mispronunciation detection and at comprehending sentences involving minimal word pairs. We argue that the phonological buffer plays a role in sentence perception during the phonological analysis of the speech stream: It sustains the temporary storage of phonological input in order to check and resolve phonological ambiguities, and it also allows reexamination of the phonological input if necessary.
INSERM U421 Equipe Neuropsychologie Interventionnelle, Creteil, and ENS, Paris, France.
Charlotte
C
Jacquemot
Emmanuel
E
Dupoux
Odile
O
Decouche
Anne-Catherine
AC
Bachoud-Levi