This article describes the case of a patient who, following herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE), retained the ability to access rich conceptual semantic information for familiar people whom he was no longer able to name. Moreover, this patient presented the very rare combination of name production and name comprehension deficits for different categories of proper names (persons and acronyms). Indeed, besides his difficulty to retrieve proper names, SL presented a severe deficit in understanding and identifying them. However, he was still able to recognize proper names on familiarity decision, demonstrating that name forms themselves were intact. We interpret SL's deficit as a rare form of two-way lexico-semantic disconnection, in which intact lexical knowledge is disconnected from semantic knowledge and face units. We suggest that this disconnection reflects the role of the left anterior temporal lobe in binding together different types of knowledge and supports the classical convergence-zones framework (e.g., Damasio, 1989) rather than the amodal semantic hub theory (e.g., Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007).
There is now considerable evidence in the literature that proper names can be selectively impaired after acquired brain damage (e.g., Carney and Temple, 1993, Fery et al., 1995, Harris and Kay, 1995, Hittmair-Delazer et al., 1994, Lucchelli and De Renzi, 1992, McKenna and Warrington, 1980, Saetti et al., 1999, Semenza and Zettin, 1988, Semenza and Zettin, 1989, Shallice and Kartsounis, 1993 and Miceli et al., 2000). This disorder has been referred to as ‘proper name anomia’ and can be defined as the inability to retrieve proper names, mainly names of people but also sometimes names of places, monuments or brands, with intact ability of retrieving common names, and that cannot be explained by a general language or memory impairment. The reverse dissociation, common noun anomia without proper name anomia, was also described, providing evidence of a double dissociation between common and proper name retrieval (Lyons et al., 2002 and Martins and Farrajota, 2007).
While proper name anomia generally involves people's names and other proper names, some rare cases demonstrated that people's names can be affected selectively, in the absence of impairment in naming places (e.g., Carney and Temple, 1993, Cohen et al., 1994, Fery et al., 1995, Lucchelli et al., 1997, Reinkemeier et al., 1997 and Verstichel et al., 1996), monuments (Fery et al., 1995, Lucchelli et al., 1997 and Verstichel et al., 1996) or brands (Lucchelli et al., 1997). However, Hanley and Kay (1998) suggested that the extension of the impairment to other proper name categories correlates with its severity and that selective people's names' anomia is observed only in the less severe cases.
Proper name anomia usually appears in the context of a cerebral infarct, in particular in the territory of the left middle cerebral artery (e.g., Crutch and Warrington, 2004, Kay and Hanley, 2002 and McKenna and Warrington, 1980), the left posterior communicating artery (e.g., Hanley, 1995 and Saetti et al., 1999) or the left thalamus (e.g., Cohen et al., 1994, Lucchelli and De Renzi, 1992, Lucchelli et al., 1997 and Moreaud et al., 1995). The other two main causes are tumor resection surgery (e.g., Bi et al., 2011, Flude et al., 1989 and Hittmair-Delazer et al., 1994) and herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) (e.g., Geva, Moscovitch, & Leach, 1997). The damaged cerebral territories are always located in the left hemisphere and spread mainly in the temporal structures. They generally encompass the anterior temporal lobe, the middle temporal lobe, the parahippocampal gyrus and the thalamus (e.g., Bi et al., 2011; Cohen et al., 1994; Damasio et al., 2004, Fukatsu et al., 1999, Saetti et al., 1999 and Shallice and Kartsounis, 1993).
In this study, we explored a new case of proper name anomia, SL, following HSE. Since his neurological ailment, SL complains about persistent word production and comprehension difficulties for names of persons, places, acronyms and some infrequent common nouns.
