An exaggerated effect for proper nouns in a case of superior written over spoken word production

Cognitive Neuropsychology

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 3-27

  Kemmerer, David ^a,b   Tranel, Daniel ^b   Manzel, Ken ^b  

^a PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGED; ANALYTICAL ERROR; ANIMAL; ARTICLE; BEHAVIOR DISORDER; BRAIN INJURY; CASE REPORT; FACE; FRUIT; HUMAN; LANGUAGE ABILITY; LINGUISTICS; MALE; MUSIC; NOMENCLATURE; PHONETICS; PRIORITY JOURNAL; SEMANTICS; SPEECH DISORDER; VEGETABLE; WRITING;

EID: 14644439873     PISSN: 02643294     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/02643290442000013     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. A note on terminology: There is currently some confusion over the proper use of the terms "semantic" and "conceptual" (see the discussion in Nickels, 2001). This debate addresses important issues regarding the relation between language and thought that are being actively investigated in cognitive science (e.g., Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003) and that deserve serious consideration in neuropsychology, as we have suggested elsewhere (e.g., Kemmerer & Tranel, 2003; Kemmerer, Tranel, & Barrash, 2001; Tranel & Kemmerer, 2004). However, the debate is not directly relevant to the present paper, so we will simply state that we use "semantic" to refer to aspects of meaning that are clearly encoded by lexical items, and "conceptual" to refer to aspects of meaning that are not necessarily encoded by lexical items.
2. Another important question involves how many levels of representation are involved in lexical access. Does access to modality-specific word nodes depend on prior access to abstract word nodes (sometimes called lemmas) in a modality-neutral lexicon, or can modality-specific lexical representations be accessed without this intermediate level? This is currently a very controversial issue (e.g., Caramazza & Miozzo, 1998; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999; Nickels, 2001, 2002; Roelofs, Meyer, & Levelt, 1998), and we will not directly address it here because the data we present can be accommodated within either approach, especially if certain assumptions about processing dynamics are changed for the lemma model (cf. Hillis, 2001, p. 192).
3. Although the OAH claims that lexical-orthographic representations can be accessed from the semantic system independently of lexical-phonological representations, this does not necessarily imply that phonology-to-orthography conversion mechanisms do not exist at the lexical level. For a review of evidence suggesting that they do, see Tainturier and Rapp (2001).
4. Other PET studies are also relevant: the left temporal pole is activated during oral naming of not only famous faces but also famous landmarks (Grabowski, Damasio, Tranel, Ponto, Hichwa, & Damasio, 2001); the middle sector of the left inferior temporal gyrus is activated during oral naming of animals not only from pictures but also from characteristic sounds (Tranel, Damasio, Eichhorn, Grabowski, Ponto, & Hichwa, 2003a); and the posterior sector of the left inferior temporal gyrus is activated during oral naming of tools not only from pictures but also from characteristic sounds (Tranel, Grabowski, Damasio, Lyon, & Koenigs, 2003b).
5. The first and second anterior coronal cuts appear to indicate additional damage in the cortex and white matter of the anterior tip of the left temporal pole. However, this is misleading. Actually, the discrepancy between the left and right temporal poles in these coronal cuts reflects a substantial reduction in the rostral extension of the left polar region relative to the right, most likely due to atrophy. This can also be perceived in the lateral view of the left hemisphere, where close inspection reveals that the vertical line demarcating the second coronal cut is slightly behind the tip of the left temporal pole, whereas the vertical line demarcating the first coronal cut is slightly behind the tip of the right temporal pole; in fact, the only reason the right temporal pole is visible in the left lateral image is because it has greater rostral extension than the left one. We are grateful to Hanna Damasio for these observations.
6. See also Kemmerer (2004), Kemmerer and Tranel (2000a, 2000b, 2003), and Kemmerer et al. (2001) for reports on RR's processing of verbs and prepositions, as well as Kemmerer (2000a, 2000b, 2003) and Kemmerer and Wright (2002) for reports on RR's processing of semantic structures that are relevant to certain grammatical constructions. He is referred to as 1962RR in most of these papers.
7. This method has limitations, but they are probably not significantly detrimental to this report because, as described below, RR's written naming performance was excellent and hence serves as a reliable indicator of well-preserved object recognition.
8. Note also that, as shown in Appendix A, several of RR's errors that were classified as phonological in nature co-occurred with semantic descriptions (e.g., armadillo → "arpa, around Texas, fall like this" [RR rolls his hands]).
9. Compound words were not considered because of uncertainties concerning their frequency.
10. Note that this spoken response could also be treated as a semantic error since it includes accurate biographical information about the person.
11. Van Valin and LaPolla (1997, pp. 59-60) point out, however, that some languages, such as German, Modern Greek, and Mandarin Chinese, are more flexible in allowing proper names to take modifiers.
12. Wingfield, Goodglass, and Smith (1990) have argued that phonemic priming is not a reliable reflection of the tacit phonological activation resulting from an anomic subject's attempt to name an object.
13. We thank two anonymous referees for these observations.
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