Naming a giraffe but not an animal: Base-level but not superordinate naming in a patient with impaired semantics

We report data on patient FK, who presented with a marked deficit in accessing semantic knowledge about objects when tested across a range of input and output modalities. FK also showed a high degree of item-specific consistency in object identification, over and above effects due to object familiarity. We show that, despite being better at naming some objects than others, FK was equally poor at discriminating the superordinate categories of the stimuli. Also, he tended to be better at matching nameable items to a base-level label than to a superordinate-level label. We discuss the implications of the data for models of semantic memory.