The role of the (output) phonological buffer in reading, writing, and repetition

Abstract

A patient is described who shows impairment in reading, writing, and repetition of nonwords, but not words. The errors in each of these tasks consisted primarily of single letter or phoneme substitutions. A confusion matrix of the stimulus/error-response relationship for each of the three tasks revealed a systematic relationship between error and target responses; error responses were strongly related phonologically to target responses. The configuration of impairments and error patterns in this patient is interpreted as resulting from damage to the phonological buffer. A functional architecture for reading, writing, and repetition, in which the role of the phonological buffer is made explicit, is proposed.