This work summarizes the current state of empirical and theoretical work on impairments of short-term memory (often caused by damage in the left cerebral hemisphere) and contains chapters from
virtually every scientist in Europe and North America working on the problem. The chapters present evidence from both normal and brain-damaged patients, providing a comprehensive view of the
functional characteristics of auditory-verbal short-term memory and its neurobiological correlates. Two neuropsychological issues are discussed in detail: the specific patterns of immediate
memory impairment resulting from brain damage, with reference to both multi-store and the interactive-activation theoretical frameworks, and the relation between verbal STM and sentence
comprehension disorders in patients with a defective immediate auditory memory, an area of major controversy in recent years.
