ABSTRACT
The role of the articulatory loop in comprehension was studied in the case of two patients with severely reduced immediate verbal memory span following brain damage. Both patients were perfect in comprehending individual words and short sentences but showed difficulty in understanding longer and more complex sentences. Evidence is presented to indicate that the effect of sentence length is not attributable to syntactic processing problems. It is suggested that the phonological storage component of the articulatory loop acts as a “mnemonic window” that facilitates comprehension by storing and maintaining the order of the sequences of words comprising the incoming text.
