Semantic field integrity and naming ability in anomic patients

Goodglass and Baker had suggested that in aphasia with verbal comprehension disorders some components of the semantic fields associated with object names are selectively undermined, and that the ability to name a particular object should be subserved by the integrity of its semantic field. We tried, employing an Association Task in which subjects judged whether or not a word was related to a target, to replicate these results by focussing our attention on two populations of anomics, with and without semantic comprehension disorders (SCD). Anomics with SCD performed worse on the Association Task than anomics without SCD and controls but, contrary to Goodglass and Baker's data, no impairment of particular associative categories in the three groups was found. Furthermore, no quantitative or qualitative differences were found between scores obtained on associations to correctly named and not named targets on both anomic groups.