Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS/EHESS/DEC-ENS, Paris, France.
Cortex. 2011 Apr;47(4):484-93. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.07.007. Epub 2010 Jul 27.
Models of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) generally distinguish between two components: a phonological buffer and a subvocal rehearsal. Evidence for these two components comes, respectively, from the phonological similarity effect and the word-length effect which disappears under articulatory suppression. But alternative theories posit that subvocal rehearsal is only an optional component of the pSTM. According to them, the depletion of the length effect under articulatory suppression results from the interference of the self-produced speech rather than the disruption of subvocal rehearsal. In order to disentangle these two theories, we tested two patients with a short-term memory deficit. FA, who presents a pseudoword repetition deficit, and FL, who does not. FA's deficit allowed for the observance of an ecological case of subvocal rehearsal disruption without any articulatory suppression task. FA's performance in pSTM tasks reveals as controls a phonological similarity effect, and contrary to controls no word-length effect. In contrast, the second patient, FL, exhibits the same effects as control subjects. This result is in accordance with models of pSTM in which the word-length effect emerges from subvocal rehearsal and disappears when this latter is disrupted.
语音短期记忆 (pSTM) 的模型通常区分两个组成部分：语音缓冲区和次发声复述。这两个组成部分的证据分别来自语音相似性效应和词长效应，而词长效应在发音抑制下消失。但是，替代理论假设次发声复述只是 pSTM 的一个可选组成部分。根据这些理论，发音抑制下长度效应的耗尽是由于自我产生的言语的干扰，而不是次发声复述的中断。为了区分这两种理论，我们测试了两名短期记忆缺陷患者。FA 表现出伪词重复缺陷，而 FL 没有。FA 的缺陷允许在没有任何发音抑制任务的情况下观察到次发声复述中断的生态案例。FA 在 pSTM 任务中的表现与对照组一样，表现出语音相似性效应，而与对照组不同的是，没有词长效应。相比之下，第二位患者 FL 表现出与对照组相同的效果。这一结果符合 pSTM 模型，其中词长效应源自次发声复述，当次发声复述中断时，该效应消失。
