Word specific impairments in naming and spelling but not reading.

A patient, who had suffered a left-hemisphere CVA, is described. He had a major aphasic syndrome which encompassed both his propositional speech and literacy skills. However, his comprehension of both spoken and written language was intact. His superior ability to retrieve nouns as opposed to other word classes was systematically investigated. This superiority of noun processing was restricted to concrete nouns. It was found that he had a significant deficit in the naming of action pictures as compared with object pictures, and a significant deficit in the written spelling of verbs as compared with nouns when matched for concreteness. His single-word reading, for all word classes, was virtually intact. The theoretical significance of these findings is discussed. It is concluded that current information processing models, that postulate a unitary phonological output store, will require elaboration in order to account for these data. We tentatively suggest that there may be exclusive output stores for naming, reading and spelling.