No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Semantic and syntactic aspects of sentence comprehension were investigated for 3 patients who showed different patterns of performance on short-term memory tasks. On a sentence anomaly judgment task assessing the retention of semantic information, only patient A.B. showed a detrimental effect on comprehension with increases in the number of words to be held in an unintegrated fashion. On judgments of grammatical acceptability, only patient M.W. demonstrated a detrimental effect of increasing the number of words intervening between the words signaling that a sentence was ungrammatical. The results suggest that semantic and syntactic components must be postulated in addition to the phonological and articulatory components of A. D. Baddeley's (1986Baddeley's ( , 1990 working memory model. Although the phonological, semantic, and syntactic components may be differentially affected by brain damage, the components interact and support each other in normal comprehension.