The role of short-term memory impairment in nonword repetition, real word repetition, and nonword decoding: A case study.
Beate Peter
PMID 28933571WHAT IT FOUND
A 65-year-old woman with short-term memory impairment repeated real words without error but made many sequencing and substitution mistakes on nonwords.
This suggests her memory deficit disrupted new sound sequences while leaving stored word patterns intact.
Key findings
01The participant made 18 sequencing and 8 substitution errors on the nonword repetition task, with migration errors accounting for nearly half of the sequencing errors.
02She produced no errors when repeating multisyllabic real words, matching the performance of the control group.
03During nonword decoding, she made 8 sequencing errors, mostly omissions, but only one substitution error.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
This is a single case report, so the findings cannot be generalised to other patients with short-term memory impairment. The cause of the participant's memory impairment was not ascertained. The comparison was made against median counts from a separate study, not direct concurrent testing, and statistical significance tests were not used due to non-homogeneous error sums. The participant also showed unexpectedly low scores on a timed nonword reading test, which the authors suggest may be due to slow processing speed rather than memory, making the interpretation of some results ambiguous.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by non-U.S. government funds, and the authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that an adult who fails nonword repetition but repeats real words perfectly has a speech motor planning disorder. This case suggests the deficit may lie in short-term memory storage for novel sequences, not in the speech production system itself.