Although research on the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language processing has focused on phonological maintenance, considerable evidence indicates that the maintenance of semantic information plays a more critical role. This article reviews studies of brain-damaged and healthy individuals demonstrating the contribution of semantic WM to language processing. On the sentence-comprehension side, semantic WM supports the retention of individual word meanings prior to their integration. It also serves to maintain semantic information in an activated state such that semantic interference between sentence constituents can be resolved. Phonological WM does not appear to support either of these functions, though it contributes to verbatim sentence recall. On the production side, evidence points to the phrase as the minimal scope of advance planning in sentence formulation, and to semantic WM as supporting the representation of the meanings of the content words within a phrase. Planning at the phonological level appears to have a very limited scope, making few demands on phonological WM. These findings imply that treatment of semantic but not phonological WM deficits should lead to improved sentence comprehension and production, and preliminary findings support that view.

尽管对语言工作记忆 (WM) 在语言处理中的作用的研究集中在语音维护上，但大量证据表明语义信息的维护起着更关键的作用。本文回顾了对大脑受损和健康个体的研究，证明了语义 WM 对语言处理的贡献。在句子理解方面，语义 WM 支持在整合之前保留单个词的含义。它还用于将语义信息保持在激活状态，从而可以解决句子成分之间的语义干扰。语音 WM 似乎不支持这些功能中的任何一个，尽管它有助于逐字回忆句子。在生产方面，证据表明，短语是句子制定中预先规划的最小范围，语义 WM 是支持短语中内容词含义的表示。语音级别的规划似乎范围非常有限，对语音 WM 的要求很少。这些发现意味着处理语义而不是语音 WM 缺陷应该会导致句子理解和生成的改善，初步发现支持这一观点。