Consequences of a Motor Programming Deficit for Rehearsal and Written Sentence Comprehension

The role of central motor processes in rehearsal was investigated by studying a braindamaged patient with a severe articulatory impairment. Evidence is presented that his articulatory impairment is due to a disruption of motor programming rather than to peripheral muscle weakness. Despite his motor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology Human experimental psychology, 1995-08, Vol.48 (3), p.536-572
Main Authors: Martin, Randi C., Blossom-Stach, Carol, Yaffee, Laura S., Wetzel, W. Frederick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Articulation Disorders - physiopathology
Articulation Disorders - psychology
Attention - physiology
Brain - physiopathology
Brain Damage, Chronic - physiopathology
Brain Damage, Chronic - psychology
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term - physiology
Middle Aged
Motor Neurons - physiology
Neuropsychological Tests
Phonetics
Practice (Psychology)
Reading
Speech Perception - physiology
Verbal Behavior - physiology
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Summary:The role of central motor processes in rehearsal was investigated by studying a braindamaged patient with a severe articulatory impairment. Evidence is presented that his articulatory impairment is due to a disruption of motor programming rather than to peripheral muscle weakness. Despite his motor programming deficit, the patient showed normal auditory span and evidence of rehearsal for auditorily presented sequences of words. For visual presentation, span was reduced and there was no evidence of rehearsal. Also, the patient showed excellent sentence comprehension for syntactically complex sentences for both auditory and visual presentation. The results imply that central motor processes are not critical for normal short-term memory, at least for auditory presentation, and that reading comprehension does not depend on inner rehearsal. This research was supported by National Institute of Health grant number DC 00218 to Rice University.
ISSN:0272-4987
1464-0740
DOI:10.1080/14640749508401405