Relationships between Working Memory Capacity and Listening and Reading Sentence Comprehension in Normal Elderly Individuals and Persons with Aphasia

The purposes of the study are to investigate whether working memory (WM) capacity significantly predicts performance on auditory and reading comprehension tasks for aphasic individuals, and to examine whether WM-group differences between low and high WM groups emerge in demanding comprehension tasks. The results revealed that WM capacity significantly predicted performance on an auditory comprehension task and on a reading comprehension task presented with a self-paced moving window method. WM group effects emerged especially under the subtests with more linguistic elements and these findings are consistent with the WM capacity model (Just & Carpenter, 1992)