Jacquemot, C., Dupoux, E., Bachoud-L‚vi, A.-C.  (submitted).
A speech perception deficit restricted to sentence processing:
The role of short term verbal memory in on-line processing

The present paper reports on two aphasic patients who have problems
detecting words or spotting mispronunciations in sentences despite 
excellent abilities to discriminate word or non-word minimal pairs 
when presented in isolation. Several experiments show that the difference 
in performance between words and sentences is observed even when controlling 
for differences in speech rate, low level masking or discriminability. 
We hypothesize that the patients' deficit is due to an impairment in 
phonological short-term memory (pSTM). Detailed investigations confirm an 
impairment in both patients and more specifically an impairment in the 
phonological store. Finally, further tests show that the difference in 
performance between words and sentences is reduced when the load in pSTM 
is controlled for. We propose a role of the pSTM and more precisely of the 
phonological store in models of continuous speech perception, and discuss 
implications of integrating the phonological store in prelexical and 
lexical processing.