The disconnection in anomic aphasia between semantic and phonological lexicons

PB, a right handed woman aged 26, has developed anomic language disturbances following right frontal and left temporal brain damage due to a road traffic accident. Her anomia shows exceptional features: it occurs in naming tasks in test conditions but not in continuous speech; it involves comprehension deficits but very few semantic errors in expression; it improves with phonemic, but not with semantic cues. These features, it is argued, indicate the disconnection between two intact lexicons: the semantic and the phonological.