Proper name anomia after right-hemispheric lesion: a case study

Abstract

This study describes the case of CH, a 68-year-old left-handed woman who suffered a right temporo-parieto-occipital infarct in the territory of the middle cerebral artery and who exhibits severe proper name anomia. During the acute stage, CH was diagnosed with severe amnestic aphasia (Aachen Aphasia Test). Her lesion mirrors those of left hemisphere impairing the processing proper names, without an aphasic language disorder in general. Seven weeks later, language improved to a mild amnestic aphasia that currently does not interfere with her daily life. However, the use of proper names in both the visual and auditory modalities was still impaired and showed no improvement after 6 months of speech therapy. While not being able to name family members or familiar persons, she was, however, still able to describe the persons’ backgrounds along with some additional semantic information. Furthermore, in a simple semantic design test, CH was selectively impaired in correctly classifying proper names into their respective word classes. Conversely, she was able to correctly name and classify other word categories (e.g., common nouns). In the subsequent study, we assessed the modalities “auditory comprehension,” “picture naming,” and “reading comprehension” and classified her responses in the categories “correctly named,” “correctly classified,” “correctly described attributes” (e.g., occupation) and “falsely named.” The results were compared with those of an age-matched healthy control group. In the visual task, CH correctly named 80% of the visualized objects, 3% of the familiar persons and 15% of the familiar city views.

Keywords:

• proper names
• common nouns
• stroke
• lexicon
• single case study
• right hemisphere

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to an earlier version of this article.