Open Peer Commentary Caplan & Waters: Working memory and sentence comprehension
Backtracking? Rehearsing and replaying some old arguments about short-term memory
Rosaleen A. McCarthy a1andE. K. Warrington a2 a1 Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 3EB, England
rm107@cam.ac.uk a2 Dementia Research Group, National Hospitals, London WC1N 3BG, England
e.warrington@dementia.ion.ucl.ac.uk
Abstract
We discuss the role of short-term auditory verbal storage
within a working memory system. Data from single case studies of
patients with left parietal lesions and selective impairment of memory
span are discussed in order to address the question of the functions
of short-term memory in language processing. The backup resource of
auditory verbal short-term memory is required for those tasks that
necessitate backtracking in order to integrate a verbal message within
a developing central cognitive representation.
