A selective impairment in the phonological output lexicon

It has been proposed that words are stored in a functional structure which consists of a semantic system and modality-specific input and output lexicons. We report a patient with disturbed word finding for given letters, but not for specific categories. The patient had difficulty in phonological similarity judgements of pictures, but performed normally on semantic similarity judgements. We conclude that this patient's impairments stemmed from a disturbance restricted to the subsystem for active judgement and selection of representations in the phonological output lexicon.