Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
Cortex. 2011 Feb;47(2):217-35. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.11.004. Epub 2010 Jan 11.
Single word production requires that phoneme activation is maintained while articulatory conversion is taking place. Word serial recall, connected speech and non-word production (repetition and spelling) are all assumed to involve a phonological output buffer. A crucial question is whether the same memory resources are also involved in single word production. We investigate this question by assessing length and positional effects in the single word repetition and reading of six aphasic patients. We expect a damaged buffer to result in error rates per phoneme which increase with word length and in position effects. Although our patients had trouble with phoneme activation (they made mainly errors of phoneme selection), they did not show the effects expected from a buffer impairment. These results show that phoneme activation cannot be automatically equated with a buffer. We hypothesize that the phonemes of existing words are kept active though permanent links to the word node. Thus, the sustained activation needed for their articulation will come from the lexicon and will have different characteristics from the activation needed for the short-term retention of an unbound set of units. We conclude that there is no need and no evidence for a phonological buffer in single word production.
单个单词的产生需要在发音转换发生的同时保持音位激活。单词序列回忆、连续语音和非单词产生（重复和拼写）都被认为涉及语音输出缓冲区。一个关键问题是，在单个单词的产生中是否也涉及相同的记忆资源。我们通过评估六位失语症患者在单个单词重复和阅读中的长度和位置效应来研究这个问题。我们预计，受损的缓冲区会导致每个音位的错误率随着单词长度的增加而增加，并且会出现位置效应。尽管我们的患者在音位激活方面存在困难（他们主要犯了音位选择错误），但他们并没有表现出缓冲区损伤所预期的效果。这些结果表明，音位激活不能自动等同于缓冲区。我们假设，现有单词的音位通过与单词节点的永久链接保持活跃。因此，它们发音所需的持续激活将来自词汇，并且与未绑定的单位集的短期保留所需的激活具有不同的特征。我们得出结论，在单个单词的产生中，不需要也没有证据表明存在语音缓冲区。
