Selective preservation of naming from description and the restricted preverbal message

We report the case of a patient, LEW, who presents with modality-specific naming deficits. He is seriously impaired in naming pictures of both objects and actions. His naming to auditory verbal definitions and of actions carried out by the experimenter is, however, relatively well preserved. He has no visual perceptual deficits and his access to the semantics of pictures is as good as that to the semantics of spoken words. While LEW is not an optic aphasic patient, his pattern of performance is relevant to the debate that has taken place of the organization of the semantic system. We discuss his case from this perspective and argue that LEW's selective deficits support the multiple semantics position. We also argue that the preverbal message level in the speech production model of Levelt (1989) is the equivalent of verbal semantics. We provide additional constraints and principles to the concept of the preverbal message and we term the system so constrained the restricted preverbal message. (C) 2000 Academic Press.