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Abstract
A left hemisphere stroke patient presented a disproportionate difficulty for body parts knowledge without autotopagnosia. The deficit concerned the lexical-semantic representation of body parts and was most severe for limbs. The ability to gesture was spared and action naming was not more impaired than object naming.
On the basis of normal naming latencies, we conclude that limbs are the most vulnerable component of the overall category of body parts. This vulnerability is not explained by unbalanced nuisance variables. More cognitive effort is probably required for the appropriate differentiation of limbs during semantic processing and lexical access.
This study was partly supported by a MIUR grant to E.C. and by a Milan University FIRST grant. Fabio Comazzi assisted in setting the naming latencies records. Rosemary Allpress revised the English text.
Notes
1The precocity of acquisition index considered here for each stimulus was gender specific and was the percentage of 97 boys aged 3–6 years that correctly named a coloured picture representing the stimulus. Therefore, unlike a true age of acquisition measure, high values of our index correspond to words that are acquired early.
2The body parts stimuli were lips, ear, nose, finger, hair, leg, arm, foot, eye, and hand. The other stimuli were bed, train, truck, table, grapes, apple, vase, bicycle, motorbike, chair, sofa, airplane, car, lemon, tomato, lamp, nail, butterfly, rooster, and hammer.
3Interestingly, a trend toward higher latencies in the naming of limbs with respect to non-limbs was observed in normal subjects by Barbarotto, Laiacona and Capitani (unpublished) using different pictures.