The left anterior temporal lobe is essential for retrieving people’s names: A case and a literature review on the contemporary models of language organization

Abstract

Several case studies have shown that left anterior temporal damage resulted in anomia for peoples’ name with preserved semantic knowledge for individuals who the anomic patients were unable to name. Here we present our surgical experience with a patient who had a brain tumor in the left anterior temporal lobe, and a brief literature review. The patient was tested pre- and postoperatively with a picture-naming task for photos of celebrities and common objects and with the Japanese Standard Language Test of Aphasia (SLTA). The patient with glioblastoma in the left anterior temporal lobe showed anomia after surgery. He showed highly specific anomia for celebrities’ names when he looked at celebrities’ photos, but his semantic knowledge about the celebrities was preserved. This patient was able to explain the jobs and characteristics of the celebrities in the photos, and upon hearing the name he could correctly identify the photo of a specific person among many photos. The postoperative object naming of common objects such as animals and tools was intact. The left anterior temporal lobe is an essential brain region to retrieve celebrities’ names.

Keywords

• Anomia
• Anterior temporal lobectomy
• Language processing