ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I review evidence from normal and language-impaired (acquired aphasia) populations that bears on the role of language processes in short-term memory (STM) and learning. Along with other mechanisms such as rehearsal, processes that activate and maintain activation of the lexical-semantic and phonological representations of a single word support the maintenance of multiple words held in a short-term buffer. Moreover, evidence from aphasia suggests that activation of semantic representations and phonological representation of words differentially support items at the beginning and end of a sequence. Impaired access to semantic representations affects maintenance of items in early serial positions and impaired phonological processing affects maintenance of items at the end of a sequence. A model is proposed to account for the contributions of word processing systems to verbal STM.
