This study explored the nature of the relation between phonological working memory (pWM) and sentence comprehension, via the assessment of comprehension in 12 Hebrew-speaking individuals with conduction aphasia who had severe pWM limitation. A series of 10 recall and recognition span tasks indicated that all the participants had limited pWM, which was significantly poorer than that of 146 control participants. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses, which require semantic-syntactic reactivation, using sentence-picture matching and plausibility judgment tasks. Experiments 3 and 4 tested phonological reactivation, using a paraphrasing task for sentences with lexical ambiguity for which the disambiguation requires re-access to the word form, and a task of rhyme judgment within sentences. The distance between a word and its reactivation site was manipulated in three ways: by the number of words/syllables, by intervening arguments, and by intervening embeddings. Although their pWM was very impaired, the individuals with conduction aphasia comprehended relative-clauses well even with long phonological and syntactic distances, and were unaffected by the distance. However, they failed to understand and judge sentences that required phonological reactivation when the phonological distance was long. The results suggest that pWM is not involved in sentences that require semantic-syntactic reactivation. pWM does, however, support comprehension in very specific conditions: when phonological reactivation is required after a long phonological distance.