Sparing of country and nationality names in a case of modality-specific oral output impairment: Implications for theories of speech production

Abstract

This paper describes a patient (BF) with Pick's disease who presented with a modality-specific category preservation. In the oral output modality (oral naming and reading aloud) she presented with a selective sparing of country and nationality names in the context of severe impairment affecting a wide variety of common and proper nouns. In the written output modality (written naming and writing to dictation) her deficits were restricted only to proper nouns (except country names). Her written production of common nouns is virtually intact. Semantic errors were present only in the oral output modality. It is argued that this evidence is seriously problematic for the dual-stage models of lexical production and for the hypothesis of obligatory phonological mediation. It is concluded that: (1) access to words' modality-specific lexical information need not to be mediated by the selection of a modality-neutral level of lexical representation (lemma); (2) orthographical lexical forms can indeed be independently accessed for production without the mediating role of phonology. The possible distinct neuronal structures underpinning country and nationality names categories are discussed.