Semantically-bounded anomia: implications for the neural implementation of naming

We describe a patient whose anomia is disproportionately severe for fruits and vegetables when familiarity and name frequency are taken into account. His fruit and vegetable naming impairment was evident in a variety of different tasks. In contrast, he retained good general knowledge of fruits and vegetables, and he could access their names when given a phonemic cue. We discuss the phenomenon of semantically-bounded anomia in relation to the issues of local vs distributed representation, the existence of semantic "maps" in the brain, and the implementation of arbitrary associations in neural networks.