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Case Reports
. 2008 Jan 15;46(1):63-81.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.08.008. Epub 2007 Aug 19.

Deafness for the meanings of number words

Agnès Caño  1 , Brenda Rapp, Albert Costa, Montserrat Juncadella
Affiliations
Case Reports

Deafness for the meanings of number words

Agnès Caño et al. Neuropsychologia. .

Abstract

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his comprehension of number and non-number words was intact. While there have been previous reports of selective difficulty or sparing of number words at the semantic and post-semantic levels, this is the first reported case of a pre-semantic deficit that is specific to the category of number words. This constitutes evidence that lexical semantic distinctions are respected by modality-specific neural mechanisms responsible for providing access to the meanings of words.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Archictecture of processing of numbers and other class of words.
Figure 2
Figure 2
2 Scan image showing MMV’s left temporo parietal lesion (2000).
Figure 3
Figure 3
MR image showing MMV’s left temporo parietal lesion (2004, four years after the stroke).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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