Deafness for the meanings of number words.
We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his comprehension of number and non-number words was intact. While there have been previous reports of selective difficulty or sparing of number words at the semantic and post-semantic levels, this is the first reported case of a pre-semantic deficit that is specific to the category of number words. This constitutes evidence that lexical semantic distinctions are respected by modality-specific neural mechanisms responsible for providing access to the meanings of words.
Caño
Agnès
A
GRNC, Parc Científic Universitat de Barcelona & Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Rapp
Brenda
B
Costa
Albert
A
Juncadella
Montserrat
M
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000368:Aged; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003638:Deafness / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*