Selective preservation of geographical and numerical information in a patient with severe anomia

This paper reports a single-case study of a patient with severe anemia, who demonstrated a remarkably spared ability to produce spoken output for nume rical and geographical information in the context of severe word-retrieval impairments for common objects and concepts. This unique profile of naming impairments does not seem to reflect problems at the level of visual proces sing or speech output. He performed poorly, however, on a set of experiment al tasks and standardized tests that we believe are heavily dependent on vi sual semantic knowledge, suggesting that impairments in visual semantic kno wledge may have underlain his category-specific naming deficits.