Selection for sentence generation in the context of severe anomia: A case series of left temporal patients

Anomia is an impairment of naming: the retrieval of specific lexical items from the mental lexicon. Theoretically, whether anomia reflects a failure of selection at the preverbal "idea" level or at the subsequent linguistic formulation stage remains a topic of debate. We investigated the preverbal mechanism of idea selection for sentence generation, which requires the selection of a proposition from among competing alternatives during message formulation, in patients with severe anomia.

Patients with lesions to the left temporal lobe (N = 12), presenting with clinically defined anomia, and matched healthy controls (N = 24) completed sentence-level tasks that required the oral generation of a sentence or single word when presented with a word, a word pair, or a sentence. Selection demands were manipulated so that the stimuli activated many competing response options (low constraint) or one dominant or few response options (high constraint).

There was no effect of stimuli constraint in the patient group that differed from that in the healthy control group on any of the generation tasks, suggesting that idea-level selection is intact in the patient group.

These findings have implications for theoretical models of spoken language production and for clinical treatments of anomia.