Selective preservation of a lexical category in aphasia: dissociations in comprehension of body parts and geographical place names following focal brain lesion

Abstract

The selective dissociation of memory for proper names is discussed in the context of a review of dissociations involving broadly defined vs narrowly defined semantic categories in brain damaged adults. Two narrowly defined categories for which dissociations have been reported are body parts (selectively impaired in comprehension) and geographical place names (selectively preserved in comprehension). In this study, 167 aphasic patients were tested for their ability to correctly identify body parts and map locations from spoken names, relative to a baseline for correct responses on general word discrimination (object identification). Wernicke's aphasics and Global aphasics both had significantly more success in pointing to named map locations and significantly worse performance in pointing to named body parts than they had in selecting other objects from multiple choice. Anomic aphasics showed precisely the opposite pattern of results. Other aphasic subgroups (Broca's aphasics, Mixed Nonfluent aphasics, Conduction aphasics, Transcortical Motor and Transcortical Sensory aphasics, and Mixed Fluent aphasics) did not show significant deviations in either direction. We suggest that the selective preservation for place names may be related to their status as proper names.