Working memory doesn't work: a critique of miyake et al.'s capacity theory of aphasic comprehension deficits

Abstract

Miyake, Carpenter, and Just (1994) argue that aphasic patients' sentence comprehension deficits may be attributed to severely reduced working memory capacity. Although the patient and normal data presented by Miyake et al. are to some extent consistent with their claim, these data may also be accounted for within a theory assuming separable processing components involved in language comprehension which are damaged differentially in different patients and which operate at different efficiencies across normal subjects. Previous findings showing that aphasic patients' comprehension does not improve under conditions minimising working memory constraints and findings of double dissociations in patients' performance on different sentence types are more easily accommodated within the theory hypothesising damage to separable components.