Preserved knowledge of maps of countries: implications for the organization of semantic memory

Recognition and naming of famous buildings: Italian normative data

Semantically unique items are concrete entities characterized by a unique cluster of semantic information. In this field, neuropsychology has always given more attention to faces than to other kind of stimuli. An important category that has been largely neglected so far is famous buildings. A total of 200 healthy Italian adults with age, sex and education homogenously distributed across subgroups were administered a famous buildings naming and recognition test, which assessed both visual and verbal modalities. The test was divided in seven sections; norms were calculated taking into account demographic variables such as age, sex and education. Multiple regression analyses showed that education influenced significantly the performance on all subtests; age had a significant effect for five subtests; sex for three subtests. Adjusted scores were used to determine inferential cutoff scores and to compute equivalent scores.

The variability of country map knowledge in normal and aphasic subjects: evidence from two new category-specific screening tests

Two new category-specific screening tests are described, tapping naming to confrontation and word comprehension at two different levels of frequency. Level I consists of 10 very high-frequency items from each of the categories of animals, manmade artefacts, colours, body parts and countries. Level II probes knowledge of 10 marginally lower frequency items from the categories of animals, man-made artefacts, fruits and vegetables, body parts and countries. A standardization study of 120 healthy older adult subjects is reported. Performance at both levels of frequency in all categories except for countries was at or close to ceiling. A retrospective validation study in the form of a review of 20 cases published during the last 20 years demonstrates the utility of the Level I test for screening for category-specific deficits in severely aphasic patients who were not able to complete more demanding formal tests of naming and comprehension. The surprising variability of map knowledge observed in the standardization sample is considered in the light of one previous report and one newly presented case (IRQ) of apparent selective impairment of country map naming skills.

Word-finding difficulty: a clinical analysis of the progressive aphasias

The patient with word-finding difficulty presents a common and challenging clinical problem. The complaint of 'word-finding difficulty' covers a wide range of clinical phenomena and may signify any of a number of distinct pathophysiological processes. Although it occurs in a variety of clinical contexts, word-finding difficulty generally presents a diagnostic conundrum when it occurs as a leading or apparently isolated symptom, most often as the harbinger of degenerative disease: the progressive aphasias. Recent advances in the neurobiology of the focal, language-based dementias have transformed our understanding of these processes and the ways in which they breakdown in different diseases, but translation of this knowledge to the bedside is far from straightforward. Speech and language disturbances in the dementias present unique diagnostic and conceptual problems that are not fully captured by classical models derived from the study of vascular and other acute focal brain lesions. This has led to a reformulation of our understanding of how language is organized in the brain. In this review we seek to provide the clinical neurologist with a practical and theoretical bridge between the patient presenting with word-finding difficulty in the clinic and the evidence of the brain sciences. We delineate key illustrative speech and language syndromes in the degenerative dementias, compare these syndromes with the syndromes of acute brain damage, and indicate how the clinical syndromes relate to emerging neurolinguistic, neuroanatomical and neurobiological insights. We propose a conceptual framework for the analysis of word-finding difficulty, in order both better to define the patient's complaint and its differential diagnosis for the clinician and to identify unresolved issues as a stimulus to future work.