Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation

SUMMARY. We describe 2 neurologically impaired patients with lesions involving primarily the left temporal lobe, whose production and comprehension of words in the semantic category of animals were disproportionately spared in 1 case and disproportionately impaired in the other, in comparison to performance with other common categories. This double dissociation provides neurally based evidence for the view that lexicalsemantic information is organized categorically.