Browsing by Author "Hanten, Gerri"

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    A phonological short-term deficit: A case study
    (1997) Hanten, Gerri; Martin, Randi C.
    The performance of a highly literate subject, BS, was assessed on tests of short-term memory. He demonstrated a pattern of performance similar to that of patients having a phonological short-term memory deficit. His profile included an exaggerated phonological similarity effect for auditorily, but not visually presented materials, the absence of a recency effect, a reversed modality effect, and difficulty repeating non-words. In contrast to previously described phonological short-term memory patients, BS performed fairly normally in a foreign language learning task, though his acquisition rate was slower than that of control subjects. This finding is counter to current theory which suggests intact phonological short-term memory is necessary to learning of new phonological forms. Further investigation of BS's deficit suggested that his areas of preserved performance were the result of strategic reliance upon semantic, lexical or orthographic factors. Thus support is demonstrated for theories of short-term memory that propose multiple components contributing to short-term memory.
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    Contributions of phonological and semantic short-term memory to sentence comprehension in normal and head injured children
    (2000) Hanten, Gerri; Martin, Randi C.
    The relation of short-term memory to sentence comprehension was investigated in 4 children who had sustained severe closed head injury. Two of the patients showed dissociation in performance on short term memory tasks. One of the patients, CS showed a pattern of performance on short term memory tasks consistent with a phonological short term memory deficit. Another patient, CB, showed a pattern of performance which suggests a deficit in semantic memory. The dissociations in short term memory tasks exhibited by these patients corresponded to a dissociation in their performance on sentence processing tasks. On a sentence anomaly judgment task in which the memory load had to be maintained before the judgment could be made CS performed similarly to the Control subjects, while CB showed a deficit which was related to memory load. The opposite pattern was observed for a verbatim sentence repetition task on which CB's performance was within the normal range, but CS was very impaired. The results support models of short term memory that postulate separable components of semantic and phonological short term memory and the differential contribution of the two components to sentence comprehension.