: When people make mistakes in this taks, they generally substitute one letter for another with a similar sound. We get similar sound-alike confusions if the letters are presented visually. Working memory has several different parts, and so they prefer to speak of a working-memory system. At the heart of the system is the central executive. This is the part that runs the show and does the real work. The executive is helped out by a number of low-level ‘assistants’. They are useful for mere storage of information and not much more. Information that will soon be neeed, can be sent off to the assistants for temporary storage. How does the rehearsal loop function? To manage the task of storing numbers while reading, working memory’s central executive must first identify the numbers. Whit that done, the executive needs to shuffle these numbers off to storage, so that it’s not burdened with them. The executive relies on the process of subvocalization to pronounce the numbers. You silently say the numbers to yourself. One che executive has initiated the speech, it can turn to other matters, and that is what we want: the chore of holding on to the numbers is how carried by the ‘inner voice’, not the executive. Subvocalization, in turn, produces a representation of these numbers in the phonological buffer. An auditory image is created in the ‘inner ear’. This image will fade away after a second or two, and before it does, the executive is needed once again: the executive ‘reads’ the contents of the buffer, as if listening to the ‘echo’ in order to remind itself what the numbers were.