SELECTIVE IMPAIRMENT OF RETRIEVING PEOPLES NAMES - A CATEGORY-SPECIFIC DISORDER

A patient with an extremely long-standing low grade glioma affecting t he left temporal lobe is described. The patient was almost entirely un able to retrieve the names of current personalities, although in other respects identification was unimpaired and nominal functions were onl y mildly inefficient. In particular geographical features and historic al figures were generally appropriately named. The problem was equally severe whether naming was to confrontation, from description or by ge neration. A similarly severe impairment was also found for the retriev al of new words that had come into the language in the last twenty yea rs (eg. aids). The impairment of retrieving people's names was interpr eted in terms of a long-standing inability to form new associations be tween meaning and phonological word-forms.