Task-dependent noun retrieval deficit: An experimental case study

Following a left occipito-temporal haematoma, a patient showed a disproportionate impairment in retrieving proper and common nouns in comparison to frequency-matched verbs. The deficit was present in the oral and written modality and the only (relatively) spared lexical classes were colours and body parts. When, however, the patient was asked to retrieve nouns in tasks that required a process of matching a noun inside the lexical system (antonym generation task) or in asemantic tasks, such as generation of nouns following phonemic cueing, the patient showed normal noun retrieval ability. It is argued that cerebral lesions can selectively impair the ability to retrieve the phonological and/or orthographic forms corresponding to specific referents and stored in the output lexicon, leaving intact the possibility of accessing these forms in other lexical tasks.