APHASIC DISORDERS OF SYNTACTIC COMPREHENSION AND WORKING-MEMORY CAPACITY

Miyake, Carpenter, and Just (1994) present results of two sentence comprehension experiments using RSVP in normal subjects, which they say simulate important features of aphasic patients' comprehension of syntactic structures. On this basis, they claim that normal and aphasic subjects' performance represents a continuum of limitations in working memory capacity. In this paper, we argue that the Miyake et al. data do not resemble the performance of aphasic patients in crucial respects, and that their results provide evidence for the opposite conclusion-namely, that the processing resource system that underlies syntactic processing and that is affected in aphasia is substantially separate from the one used for other verbal tasks, such as reasoning and problem solving, which is tested in tasks such as the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading span task.