The selective impairment of fruit and vegetable knowledge:amultiple processing channels account of fine-grain...

We report the case of a gentleman, FAV, who developed a grave anomia and selective comprehension deficit following a left temporo-occipital infarction. His word retrieval abilities were significantly more impaired for living things than for man-made artefacts. There was no difference between his performance when naming to confrontation and naming to verbal description. However, further assessment revealed a more fine-grain deficit at the level of comprehension. FAV had significantly more difficulty with fruit and vegetables than animals or nonliving foods on a number of tests probing semantic knowledge. These results are discussed within the context of current theories of the organisation of conceptual knowledge. We conclude that this pattern of performance and other fine-grain category effects within the realms of living and nonliving things are best explained by a multiple processing pathways account.