Introduction

As a task that requires the integration of temporally distributed input, sentence comprehension clearly involves short-term memory (STM) capacity. Little has been done to define the storage requirements for sentence-processing tasks, although the STM capacities underlying the retention of word list materials have been extensively studied. It is likely, however, since both tasks deal with strings of lexical items, that they have some mnestic requirements in common. This is implicit in the assumption that the phonological store, thought to be the primary vehicle for information storage in spantype tasks (see Baddeley, this volume, chapter 2), contributes to sentence processing as well (e.g., Clark & Clark, 1977). Studies that have demonstrated trade-offs between concurrent comprehension and list memory tasks (Savin & Perchonock, 1965; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978) provide prima facie support for this notion, as do indications that sentential input is held in phonological form prior to the identification of clausal units (Jarvella, 1971; but see Von Eckhardt & Potter, 1985).

Additional evidence for storage capacities common to sentence processing and list retention has come from neuropsychological investigations. Brain-damaged patients with selective STM deficits, as defined by Shallice and Vallar in chapter 1 of this volume, have invariably demonstrated some degree of impairment on tests of sentence comprehension. The difficulties of these patients appear to lie, moreover in structural aspects of sentence processing, which is where access to an information store that represents a linear array of lexical items is likely to be most useful.

Introduction

Our goal is to investigate the role of the verbal working memory system in sentence comprehension, by presenting a model of working memory in sufficient detail to allow specific predictions to be made and tested. In testing this account, we draw on experimental methods that have recently been used in research on language development. These methods are designed to control the various sources of potential difficulty in the standard laboratory tasks used to assess children's grammatical knowledge and their use of this knowledge in sentence comprehension. We illustrate how our proposals about working memory, together with the recent innovations in method, allows us to infer that abnormal limitations in phonological processing, and not absence of grammatical knowledge, are at the root of the difficulties in spoken sentence understanding that are apparent in children with reading disability.

Since reading problems are most transparent at the beginning stages of learning to read, we focus our attention there, by investigating the linguistic abilities of poor readers in the early school years. By “poor readers” we mean children who show a marked disparity between their measured level of reading skill and the level of performance that might be expected in view of their intelligence and opportunity for instruction. Our research compares performance by these children with age-matched controls – children who are proceeding at the expected rate in the acquisition of reading skills (for discussion of the issues regarding subtypes of reading disability and choice of control groups, see Shankweiler, Crain, Brady & Macaruso, in press).

Many claims have been made attributing comprehension deficits in brain-damaged subjects to their short-term memory deficits (e.g., Saffran & Marin, 1975; Caramazza, Basili, Koller, & Berndt, 1981; Vallar & Baddeley, 1984a; Friedrich, Martin, & Kemper, 1985; Martin, Jerger, & Breedin, 1987). However, among the patients with similar restrictions in memory span, different levels of comprehension have been found. In fact, some recent studies have demonstrated impressive sentence-processing abilities in individuals with very restricted memory spans (Vallar & Baddeley, 1984a; Butterworth, Campbell, & Howard, 1986; Martin, 1987; McCarthy & Warrington, 1987a, b; Caplan & Hildebrandt, 1988). Before dealing in detail with the empirical evidence on patients’ short-term memory and comprehension abilities, this chapter addresses current theories of the comprehension process with an emphasis on the possible points at which various types of memory storage might be involved. This discussion is followed by a consideration of evidence regarding the types of memory storage that appear to be involved in typical short-term memory tasks and how these might overlap with those involved with comprehension. With this background in mind, the patterns of associations and dissociations in brain-damaged individuals will be brought to bear in determining what connections between memory and comprehension appear consistent with current evidence.

What has to be remembered during sentence comprehension?

The goal of sentence processing is to arrive at a representation of the meaning of the sentence.

Models of memory

Research on short-term memory (STM) provides a particularly good example of the fruitful interaction of neuropsychology with techniques and theories developed in the study of normal memory. Since the majority of contributions to this volume will be concerned with data from patients, it was suggested that an overview of the field from the viewpoint of normal memory might be appropriate. This will be attempted, followed by a more detailed discussion of some of the issues that remain unresolved, and where further neuropsychological evidence might be particularly revealing.

How many kinds of memory?

In his classic book The Organization of Behavior, Hebb proposed that memory comprised two separable systems, one based on temporary reverberating electrical activity, the other representing a more long-term change based on neural growth. Such a dichotomy became more widely supported in the late 1950s with the development of a range of techniques that appeared to indicate some kind of temporary storage where forgetting was rapid and was assumed to be based on trace decay (Broadbent, 1958; Brown, 1958; Peterson and Peterson, 1959).

In the early 1960s, Melton (1963) argued that the assumption of a dichotomy was unnecessary and unparsimonious. He maintained that the phenomena attributed to short-term memory could better be conceptualized as reflecting the functioning of normal long-term memory (LTM) under conditions of brief presentation and minimal learning, with forgetting being based on the principles of interference theory. During the mid-1960s this led to a flurry of activity concerned with the question of whether it was necessary to assume separate long- and short-term memory systems. Evidence came from a number of sources, but the following three were perhaps the most prominent.

The behaviour of “short-term memory” patients on short-term memory tasks is of interest because their performance contrasts so strongly with those of normal adults. The approach of contrasting normal adult behaviour with that of other groups can be extended to other populations whose performance differs markedly from the normal adult pattern. This part includes discussions of short-term memory performance in children (Hitch, chapter 9); in the elderly (Craik, Morris, & Gick, chapter 10); in the deaf – or rather the procedure, lipreading, they use (Campbell, chapter 11) and in two types of neurological patients (Howard & Franklin, chapter 12; Kinsbourne & Hicks, chapter 13).

Hitch (chapter 9) reports a number of studies concerning the development of working memory in children of various ages. He suggests that developmental studies may usefully complement neuropsychological research in advancing our understanding of normal cognitive processes, such as short-term memory, since both can be based on a “fractionation” methodology. The neuropsychological fractionation method currently used in patients with acquired brain lesions capitalizes on the presumed more or less complete damage of specific functional component(s), for example, the phonological short-term store, to investigate the functional architecture of aspects of the cognitive system. In the case of normal children the fractionation approach advocated by Hitch assumes that the normal development of cognitive abilities may be characterized by the addition of subsystems, which previously were relatively nonoperative. If this is the case, the study of children of different ages should produce results complementary to those obtained with brain-damaged patients.

In recent years the single-case approach has grown greatly in popularity in neuropsychology. Some workers have even argued that no pretheoretical generalizations across patients can be justified (e.g., Caramazza, 1986), for, they argue, one cannot know that any two patients have functionally equivalent lesions. Yet it is equally argued by people who hold these general positions that our theoretical understanding of the neurological organization of cognitive function is rudimentary, so theoretically driven grouping of patients is to be avoided too (see Ellis, 1987).

This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Any science needs a data base that has some depth. A tentative understanding of the range of empirical phenomena that occur in a domain should be available. How robust the phenomena are needs to be roughly known.

A practical way out of the dilemma is to take putative syndromes – patients with a common cluster of difficulties that can plausibly be attributed to a common functional cause – and to present multiple mixed practical-theoretical investigations of a domain by different investigators. Even if the syndrome proves not to be a single functional entity, the studies should provide a solid basis for future research. The overlapping empirical observations on different patients will provide an adequate basis for future theoretical analyses. Competing theoretical perspectives will sharpen the perspective for future empirical investigations. Two pioneer books on the acquired dyslexias – Deep Dyslexia (Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980) and Surface Dyslexia (Patterson, Marshall, & Coltheart, 1985) – illustrate the value of the approach. Neither syndrome has remained solidly accepted as a single functional entity, but the value of each book in defining its field is undoubted.

Introduction

The importance of phonological coding to immediate memory performance has been apparent for many years, starting with Conrad's (1964) important demonstration of phonological errors in a memory task for visually presented letters. The specific characteristics of the phonological code have been the subject of debate, however. For example, Besner has argued (Besner, Davies, & Daniels, 1981; Besner & Davelaar, 1982) that the phonological representations underlying reading and short-term memory (STM) tasks are dissociable and that there are at least two kinds of phonological representations. A number of other distinctions among speech-based codes and processes have been described as well, including a distinction between a sensory “echoic” and a more abstract phonological representation (e.g., Crowder, 1978), between “auditory” and “phonetic” codes used in speech perception (e.g., Pisoni, 1973), between “assembled” and “addressed” phonological processes in reading (e.g., Patterson, 1982), and between a phonological store and an articulatory loop in working memory (e.g., Vallar & Baddeley, 1984b; Baddeley, 1986).

The neuropsychological literature certainly seems to suggest that multiple representations are available for use in immediate memory tasks. Indeed, much of the recent literature on STM impairments has been interpreted in the context of a model of working memory that includes a phonological store and an articulatory rehearsal process that are separable (e.g., Shallice & Butterworth, 1977; Vallar & Baddeley, 1984a, b; Baddeley, 1986; Vallar & Cappa, 1987). It remains unclear how many different types of representations are available, what the relationships between the different types of representations are, and how multiple, simultaneously active representations might contribute to immediate memory performance.

The first part of the book comprises four chapters that discuss two main issues: (a) the possible functional architecture of the system(s) involved in the short-term retention of verbal material (Shallice & Vallar, chapter 1; Baddeley, chapter 2; Friedrich, chapter 3); and (b) some neural correlates (chapter 1; Starr, Barrett Pratt, Michalewski, & Patterson, chapter 4).

Two main approaches are suggested on the functional structure of verbal short-term memory. Shallice and Vallar and Baddeley take the view of verbal short-term memory as a multicomponent system, which includes a number of distinct processing and storage subcomponents. Shallice and Vallar review the neuropsychological and, more briefly, the normal evidence for this approach. They consider a number of specific phenomena, such as auditory–verbal memory span and the recency effect in free and serial recall, noting a convergence in the findings obtained from normal subjects and patients. They note that a number of aspects of the original observations (Warrington & Shallice, 1969) of a selective impairment on span tasks have been replicated in a considerable number of cases, which they review. The evidence from normal subjects supports the position that short-term memory effects from paradigms such as span reflect the operation of a buffer store where information is coded phonologically. The results obtained from the patients are very similar to what would be expected if such a component were severely damaged. On the basis of this type of argument, Shallice and Vallar suggest that the selective deficit of auditory-verbal span may be conceived as a functional syndrome, which may be traced back to the selective impairment of a specific component of verbal short-term memory.

Part II of this book comprises four chapters dealing with the relationship between phonological short-term storage and the other processes involved in the retention of verbal information. All four chapters report data from individual case studies of shortterm memory patients. They emphasize that immediate retention of verbal material involves more than one level of representation and attempt to specify how these different levels contribute.

Phonological storage is not carried out in a single isolated system (see, e.g., Monsell, 1984; Barnard, 1985). The storage system responsible interacts with low-level (acoustic, nonphonological) components (see Berndt & Mitchum, chapter 5; Campbell, chapter 11). Within the phonological level, interrelated input and output subcomponents may be distinguished (see Campbell, chapter 11; Howard & Franklin, chapter 12) and possibly also lexical and prelexical ones (see Saffran & Martin, chapter 6). At a higher level of processing, interactions with lexical–semantic (Saffran & Martin, chapter 6) and syntactic–semantic (Butterworth, Shallice, & Watson, chapter 8) systems with longterm memory properties may occur. Finally, short-term memory tasks also involve highly controlled executive subcomponents (see Baddeley, chapter 2; McCarthy & Warrington, chapter 7; Craik, Morris, & Gick, chapter 10; Crain, Shankweiler, Macaruso, and Bar-Shalom, chapter 18). The discussion of the relationships of the phonological short-term store with other functional components of mental functions is of course not confined to this part, but may be found, in a variety of theoretical approaches, in most chapters of the book. This may be taken as an indication of the highly interactive nature of the system.

Introduction

Research on memory has provided considerable evidence for a verbal short-term memory (STM) system that is involved in memory tasks, such as span, free recall, probe recognition, and the Brown–Peterson paradigm, in which subjects must retain small amounts of linguistic information over brief periods of time. There is evidence that the representations in STM include phonological forms (Conrad, 1964) and that these representations are maintained in STM in part through a process that involves articulatory rehearsal (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975). The specific character of the STM system is the subject of investigation and debate. One view (see Shallice & Vallar, chapter 1, and Baddeley, chapter 2, this volume) maintains that auditorily presented items are entered into a phonological store (PS) directly (Salame & Baddeley, 1982; Baddeley, Lewis, & Vallar, 1984; Greene & Crowder, 1984), while printed items are entered, at least in part, through a controlled process of subvocal rehearsal (Murray, 1968; Levy, 1971; Peterson & Johnson, 1971; Estes, 1973; Baddeley et al., 1984). There appears to be a progressive diminishing of the strength of the phonological representations in the phonological store over a period that has been variously estimated to last between 2 and 20 sec (Crowder & Morton, 1969; Wickelgren, 1969; Darwin, Turvey, & Crowder, 1972). However, the strength of these representations can be increased through the controlled use of articulatory rehearsal processes (the articulatory loop [AL]: Baddeley et al., 1984; Baddeley and Lewis, 1984).

Until recently, cognitive psychologists had interpreted memory changes in old age in terms of “process” models for information flow. A meticulously detailed exemplar is the “working memory” model first proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) and since extensively developed (Baddeley, Grant, Wight, & Thompson, 1975; Baddeley & Lieberman, 1980). Information from the sense organs is “encoded” into characteristic “representations” in one or more modality-based subsystems (the visual “scratch pad” and the auditory “articulatory loop”). Besides its own characteristic representation code, each of these subsystems has characteristic temporal holding characteristics, which may depend on rate limitations to a dynamic process (the refreshment cycle time of the articulatory loop) or on capacity limitations of unknown provenance (the capacity of the scratch pad). Each subsystem also has its characteristic place in an information-routing diagram for the total “memory system.”

In this framework, the study of cognitive aging has become an investigation of the differential vulnerability of subsystems and of their linkages. Thus, among other excellent recent reviews, Erber (1982) discusses changes in the efficiency of “sensory memory,” “primary memory,” “secondary memory,” and dynamic read-in and read-out processes (encoding and retrieval). Kausler (1982) uses a similar “bottom-up” hierarchical description of changes in hypothetical “primary memory” and “episodic memory” systems. Craik (1976) suggests a framework for interpreting age changes in memory in terms of a hierarchical scheme of progressively “deeper” processing stages.

The origins of memories

Chapters 11, 12, and 13 are concerned with age differences in memory for spoken and written information and focus mainly on the processes of encoding and comprehension. This chapter is concerned with the nature of the memory representation and with wider issues arising out of the distinction between perceived and generated memories. This distinction applies to memory for all kinds of information, including scenes, events, and actions as well as discourse.

However, many memories are for things that never happened. This statement seems paradoxical because we tend to assume that memory representations originate from perceived events. We overlook the fact that memories may also be for events that never actually occurred, but have only been thought of or dreamed about. They may be memories of actions that were never performed, but only planned, considered, or intended. They may be memories of words that were never heard or read, but only imagined or inferred. The distinction between externally derived memories that originate from perceptions and internally derived self-generated memories is not always clear-cut. According to current cognitive theories, the sensory information derived from external events is interpreted, elaborated, or transformed by the application of stored prior knowledge and rules. So a perceived memory representation is a joint product comprising some elements that originated internally and some elements that originated externally.

There are growing numbers of people whose lives have been extended through the application of increasingly sophisticated medicine and surgery, but whose memory functioning remains severely impaired. In many cases these impairments will be so bad that a normal life cannot be led; yet therapy, which might enable the severely memory-impaired person to return to the community, frequently is unobtainable. Many people who face such a predicament will consult doctors and other medical staff who, through lack of knowledge, believe that little or nothing can be done to alleviate some of the problems connected with memory impairment. At best, a psychological assessment of memory difficulties may be offered, but usually this is not followed up by advice on how to manage or, in some cases, overcome the problems that have been highlighted by the assessment.

A possible explanation for the existence of such a situation in the health services may have much to do with the lack of evidence to suggest that restoration of memory is possible. However, though I do not quarrel with the view that practically nothing can be done to restore memory functioning, I do want to claim emphatically that there is always something that can be done to improve the daily life of a memory-impaired person. At the same time as holding this view, I want to dissociate myself from the opinion that memory problems will disappear if the “right” drug or therapy is provided.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the study of naturalistic, everyday problem-solving behavior in adulthood. There are many questions that could be addressed regarding the study of everyday problem solving: What kind of measures should be developed? How should these measures be developed? How should reliability and validity be established? And so forth. But the question that needs to be addressed first is why we should study everyday problem solving in adults, and that is the question that will be addressed first in this chapter. The rationale frequently given for studying everyday problem solving will be followed by an empirically and logically based critique of the rationale. Then the developmental research that has already been conducted with everyday problemsolving tasks will be presented, followed by presentation of a model of cognitive development that is consistent with the research findings. Then the potential of everyday problem-solving research to answer questions about nomothetic developmental functions will be called into question. Finally, the chapter closes with recommendations for further research.

The rationale for study of everyday problem solving

The recent interest in everyday problem solving has occurred as a result of developing concern over the validity of our traditional laboratory measures of problem solving when those measures are used with middle-aged and older adults. Because most traditional laboratory problem-solving tasks were developed for use with children or young adults, it is reasonable to question their relevance for middle-aged and older adults.