Nonlinguistic memory in aphasia.

Two experiments were carried out to assess nonlinguistic memory in aphasia. In the first experiment, subjects had to make judgments about the frequency with which words in a study list were repeated, and, in the second, they had to recall the spatial location in which a pictured object had been presented originally. Aphasics were very accurate in both tasks and did not differ from normal controls. It is suggested that a comprehensive account of memory in aphasia requires that we look beyond their omnipresent language deficit to more general processing factors such as attentional capacity.