Short-Term Memory Training in Aphasia: Patterns of Treatment- Induced Learning and their Implications for Sentence Comprehension

摘要

Auditory-verbal short-term memory (STM) deficits and their effects on aphasie sentence comprehension have been contested for decades. Several studies revealed close links between STM and sentence comprehension in aphasia. For example, STM contributes to the processing of sentences with many content words (Martin & Feher, 1990). A recent study found that STM correlated with spoken sentence comprehension (Leff, Schofield, Crinion, Seghier, Grogan, Green & Price, 2009). However, only a handful of studies have investigated training of STM in aphasia. Using a novel treatment of STM in a person with aphasia, we sought to determine if the treatment would result in: A. improvements in STM (measured by span tasks); B. generalization to sentence comprehension (measured by the Token Test (TT, McNeil & Prescott, 1978) and the Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG, Bishop, 1989)).