Early authors (Marie, 1908; Wolpert, 1930; Weisenburg and McBride, 1935) have already maintained the existence of some memory disturbances in aphasia, but these assumptions were based exclusively on usual clinical examinations, and were not supported by more comprehensive experimental studies, that have appeared only much later.
Wyke (1966) has studied the learning of nonsense syllables in eight patients with severe dysphasia, showing that the difficulties encountered by these patients were greater than those of non‐dysphasic subjects.
It was found by Russo and Vignolo (1967), Newcombe and Marshall (1967), Poeck et al. (1973) that in patients displaying left‐side lesions, visual recognition was more impaired in the aphasic than in the non‐aphasic ones.
In a recent work, Beauvois and Lhermitte (1975) have shown that as compared to normal subjects, the aphasics, taken as a group, have poorer performances on immediate repetition and learning.
In our previous studies (Kreindler and Fradis, 1963; Kreindler, Fradis, Mihilescu, and Sevastopol, 1976) in which immediate visual memory in aphasics was analysed comparatively by four tests for recognition, learning, association memory, and recall, we found that the last aspect of memory (recall) was the most disturbed. In another investigation (Milhilescu, Fradis, and Kreindler, 1965), we studied immediate and long‐term memory in aphasics, and found that after an interval, the aphasic loses a greater part of the memorized material than the normal subject does. A synthesis of the investigations of the Romanian School concerning memory disturbances in aphasics has been presented in the book Performances in Aphasia by Kreindler and Fradis (1968).
In the present study we set ourselves the task of analysing the severity of the aphasic's recall disturbances as a function of the type of stimulus used (visual‐auditory, verbal‐non‐verbal) and of other characteristics of the stimulus such as its position in the series, frequency and length of the word.