The nature of the disorder underlying the inability to retrieve proper names

Two patients with the syndrome of proper name anemia were investigated. Bot h patients were only able to produce around 50% of the names of contemporar y celebrities, but performed significantly better on a task calling for nam ing of historical figures. The names of relatives and friends were spared i n one patient, while the other retrieved names of people known since childh ood much better than those of people familiar to him since the age of 25. G eographical names, names of monuments and masterpieces were preserved. The above dissociations are taken to imply that in moderately impaired patients , a temporal gradient effect concurs to modulate the severity of the naming block. A similar impairment was found in both patients when they attempted to retr ieve or relearn familiar telephone numbers. This finding suggests that the core of the disorder resides in the inability to gain access to words used to identify a single entity, regardless of whether they belong to the class of proper or common names.