Short-Term and Working Memory Treatments for Improving Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia: A Review and a Replication Study.

The new replication had only five participants, so it cannot show how most people with aphasia would respond. The reviewed studies were also small, and some included sequential treatments, so it is unclear which treatment component caused any change. The replication did not assess whether each participant had semantic or phonological short-term memory deficits, so the theoretical prediction was not tested. A psychosocial comparison for patient 3 was the only significant change, so it may not represent a treatment effect. The authors note that many short-term and working memory tests used in aphasia research have weak psychometric properties. Some reviewed studies did not clearly describe feedback or the number of practice attempts, and the replication's semantic relatedness fidelity was 78%.

The authors receive salaries from their respective institutions. They report no other known conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that short-term memory training improves sentence comprehension in aphasia. The new five-person replication found no statistically significant sentence comprehension change, and across the reviewed studies only four of 11 people showed some improvement.