Analysis of lexical recovery in an individual with acute anomia

Observing recovery of cognitive functions may provide converging evidence a bout the organization of systems that mediate cognitive functions. We analy zed recovery of lexical abilities in a patient, HH, with an acute onset of anomic aphasia following a cerebral infarction confined to the left temporo -occipital junction (area 37). His initial assessment, described in detail elsewhere (Raymer et al. 1997a), indicated a cross-modal anomia arising at a stage in lexical processing at which semantic information accesses phonol ogical and orthographic lexical mechanisms for speech and writing. We also documented reading and spelling impairments that we attributed to developme ntal deficits. We now report our patient's follow-up testing at 6 and 15 mo nths post-stroke. Recovery testing demonstrated significant improvements in task performance across recovery phases: word retrieval in naming and spel ling tasks recovered in the earlier recovery phase and reading improved at the later testing. Word frequency effects varied across observations. Over time, error patterns evolved from off-target and semantically related respo nses towards correct responses. The parallel recovery patterns in oral and written naming support our proposal that a common impairment was responsibl e for the cross-modal anomia. In contrast, recovery of reading and spelling skills contradicts our hypothesis that these problems were developmental i n origin.