Proper name anomia with preserved lexical and semantic knowledge after left anterior temporal lesion: A two-way convergence defect

This article describes the case of a patient who, following herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE), retained the ability to access rich conceptual semantic information for familiar people whom he was no longer able to name. Moreover, this patient presented the very rare combination of name production and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cortex 2015-04, Vol.65 (Apr), p.1-18
Main Authors: Busigny, Thomas, de Boissezon, Xavier, Puel, Michèle, Nespoulous, Jean-Luc, Barbeau, Emmanuel J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anomia - diagnosis
Anomia - pathology
Anterior temporal lobe
Cognitive science
Convergence zone
Face - physiology
Humans
Knowledge
Male
Mental Recall - physiology
Middle Aged
Neuropsychological Tests
Neuroscience
Person recognition
Proper name anomia
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Semantic memory
Semantics
Temporal Lobe - pathology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article describes the case of a patient who, following herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE), retained the ability to access rich conceptual semantic information for familiar people whom he was no longer able to name. Moreover, this patient presented the very rare combination of name production and name comprehension deficits for different categories of proper names (persons and acronyms). Indeed, besides his difficulty to retrieve proper names, SL presented a severe deficit in understanding and identifying them. However, he was still able to recognize proper names on familiarity decision, demonstrating that name forms themselves were intact. We interpret SL's deficit as a rare form of two-way lexico-semantic disconnection, in which intact lexical knowledge is disconnected from semantic knowledge and face units. We suggest that this disconnection reflects the role of the left anterior temporal lobe in binding together different types of knowledge and supports the classical convergence-zones framework (e.g., Damasio, 1989) rather than the amodal semantic hub theory (e.g., Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007).
ISSN:0010-9452
1973-8102
DOI:10.1016/j.cortex.2014.12.008