According to contemporary accounts, linguistic behavior reflects the interaction of distinct representations supporting word meaning and phonology. However, there is controversy about the extent to which this interaction occurs within task-specific systems, specialized for reading and short-term memory (STM), as opposed to between components that…

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show deficits in phoneme binding in immediate serial recall: when attempting to reproduce a sequence of words that they no longer fully understand, they show frequent migrations of phonemes between items (e.g., cap, frog recalled as "frap, cog"). This suggests that verbal short-term memory emerges directly from…

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought…

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) make numerous phoneme migration errors when recalling lists of words they no longer fully understand, suggesting that word meaning makes a critical contribution to phoneme binding in verbal short-term memory. Healthy individuals make errors that appear similar when recalling lists of nonwords, which also lack…

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

Semantic dementia patients make numerous phoneme migration errors in their immediate serial recall of poorly comprehended words. In this study, similar errors were induced in the word recall of healthy participants by presenting unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. This technique revealed that lexicality, word frequency, imageability,…