Musical instrument naming impairments: The crucial exception to the living/nonliving dichotomy in category-specific agnosia

In category-specific agnosia (CSA) patients typically have more trouble nam ing animals. fruits, and vegetables than tools, furniture, and articles of clothing. A crucial exception to this living vs nonliving rule involves the category of musical instruments. Patients with problems naming living obje cts often repeatedly fail to name musical instruments. In CSA it is crucial to equate living and nonliving object lists on object name frequency, comp lexity, and familiarity. The present study shows, however, that even the mo st rigorously controlled object lists can lead to erroneous conclusions if nonliving stimuli contain an overrepresentation of musical instruments. Nam ing capabilities of a herpes encephalitis patient were assessed using match ed lists of living and nonliving objects and showed no indication of catego ry specific deficits. When exemplars were separated into biological objects , musical instruments and man-made artifacts strong category-specificity em erged: artifact naming was flawless whereas musical instrument and biologic al object naming were both severely impaired. it is concluded thar CSA is a veridical phenomenon but that our understanding or CSA is limited by adher ing to the spurious living/nonliving distinction. (C) 2000 Academic Press.