Implicit word cues facilitate impaired naming performance: Evidence from acase of anomia

Word-finding difficulties observed in some patients with anemia have been a ttributed to an insufficient activation of phonology by semantics. There ar e, however, few direct tests of this hypothesis. This paper reports the cas e of FR, who presented with anemic aphasia following temporal lobe epilepsy and a cavernoma in the left superior temporal lobe. His anemic deficit was characterised by: (1) no apparent associated semantic impairment; (2) item consistency for accuracy and errors across different administrations; (3) accuracy strongly correlated with word Frequency; and (4) a partial, albeit weak, knowledge of the gender of unnamed items. We conducted a naming expe riment in which target pictures were implicitly primed by briefly presented masked words. Results showed that the prior presentation of the written ta rget name improved accuracy. When compared with unprimed trials, the presen ce of the primes also increased phonological errors and decreased semantic errors. We argue that automatic phonological activation derived directly fr om the implicit written primes interacted with the remaining phonological i nput from the picture's semantic representation leading to increased accura cy and a change in the balance of error types. (C) 2001 Academic Press.