Sparing of country names in the context of phonological impairment

Many single case studies have reported selective impairment of proper or common names in anomic speakers, providing evidence for a categorical organisation of the lexical-semantic network. These dissociations have been observed in oral and/or written naming and sometimes in comprehension. Here we report the case of an aphasic patient with severely impaired phonological encoding presenting a dissociation between proper and common names. Superior production of countries and nationalities was observed in all output tasks (naming, reading and repetition). The interest of a preservation of proper name categories in the context of phonological impairment lies in the question of the propagation of categorical organisation to the processes of phonological encoding. We suggest that the observed dissociation can be explained by relative sparing of countries and nationalities at lexical-semantic level as in previous reported cases and that this organisation spreads beyond lexical selection, to phonological encoding.