Recuerdo de materia verbal en niños con disfasia funcional

Abstract

The performance in different tasks (i.e., free inmediate and delayed recall of digits, syllables, words, pictures and short sentences) of 8 children diagnosed as functional dysphasics was compared to that of two control groups matched for linguistic development and chronological age and IQ. The performance of dysphasic children was significantly worse than that of controls in the recall of syllables, words, short sentences, and names of pictures, but not in the recall of digits. These results support the conclusion that there is a selective deficit of phonological working memory in dysphasia, and that this deficit is both and essential characteristic and a definitory aspect of the disorder. In addition to that, the large number and nature of the errors of dysphasics when retrieving sentences and names of pictures leads to speculate that the deficit cannot be solely due to a reduced span capacity or to a fast decay of the phonological trace, but also to difficulties in lexical access and retrieval. Results are explained according to an interactive activation model.