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

TLDR

The study reports a patient who can read, write, and repeat words but shows impairments in nonword reading, writing, and repetition. The authors propose a functional architecture that explicitly incorporates the phonological buffer to explain these deficits. Using a confusion matrix of stimulus–error responses across the three tasks, the authors show that errors are phonologically related to targets and use this relationship to inform the proposed architecture. The patient’s errors were primarily single‑letter or phoneme substitutions, and the pattern of impairments was interpreted as evidence of damage to the phonological buffer.

Abstract

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.