Selective Impairment of Retrieving People's Names: A Category Specific Disorder?

A patient with an extremely long-standing low grade glioma affecting the left temporal lobe is described. The patient was almost entirely unable to retrieve the names of current personalities, although in other respects identification was unimpaired and nominal functions were only mildly inefficient. In particular geographical features and historical figures were generally appropriately named. The problem was equally severe whether naming was to confrontation, from description or by generation. A similarly severe impairment was also found for the retrieval of new words that had come into the language in the last twenty years (eg. aids). The impairment of retrieving people's names was interpreted in terms of a long-standing inability to form new associations between meaning and phonological word-forms.