Category-specific Naming Impairment for Artefacts: A New Case

Most cases of category-specific naming and recognition disorders are characterized by poorer performance with living entities, usually animals. Patients with the less frequently observed opposite pattern of impairment, i.e. better performance with biological entities than with non-living things, provide evidence for a double dissociation, making a strong case for the categorical organization of the semantic system. We describe a patient with a category-specific naming Impairment for tools. GP is a 27-year-old student, evaluated after the evacuation of a haemorrhage in the left temporal lobe. Naming was severely impaired, without significant modality, frequency, word length or grammatical class effects. A significantly inferior performance was present for non-living items (furniture and tools). GP's performance on tests assessing comprehension of the same Items (word-picture matching, forced-choice sentence verification) suggested that semantic knowledge about artefacts he could not name was largely preserved. The localization of the lesion confirms the important role of the left anterior temporal lobe in lexical retrieval.