Exploring the Relationship between Working Memory Capacity and Syntactic Deficits in Aphasia

Measures of working memory (WM) capacity correlate with individual’s performance in a wide range of different cognitive tasks, from math skills to language comprehension. Over the past 50 years, it has been shown that WM deficits are an important part of cognitive deficits associated with aphasia. However, experimental studies of the Russian-speaking population fail to discriminate the relationship between WM limitations and syntax (both production and comprehension) impairments in patients with different aphasia types. The current study investigates the contribution of working memory to comprehension and production of language in terms of syntactic processing in aphasia. The methods include conducting an experiment with 14 patients with different aphasia types (6 fluent, 8 non-fluent) and 14 healthy age-matched controls. All participants were presented with a set of WM and STM (short-term memory) tests along with language production and comprehension tasks. The results include a significant decrease in WM and STM capacity in individuals with aphasia compared to the individuals without brain damage and a moderate positive correlation between participants with aphasia’ WM scores and their performance on the language tests.