CATEGORY-SPECIFIC NAMING IMPAIRMENTS - YES

Recently, Stewart, Parkin, and Hunkin (1992) have questioned previously reported cases of selective damage in processing items from categories of animate objects, arguing that there has been a lack of adequate control for visual familiarity, visual complexity, and name frequency of the stimuli employed. When re-testing Michelangelo (see Sartori & Job, 1988), one of the patients cited.by Stewart et al. (1992), with a set of materials matched on all three factors, the asymmetry in naming animal and artefact items still remains. An analogous pattern is obtained when-in addition to such factors-the visual similarity within the sub-sets of animals and artefacts is taken into account. These results constitute empirical evidence for category-specific impairments and cannot be interpreted as being due to isolated or conjoint effects of visual familiarity, visual complexity, or name frequency.