Luria on amnestic aphasia

The Working Brain p. 156
goes with " speech memory" and anomia. Luria states that outwardly these patients with parietal lesions resemble those with middle temporal gyrus anomia, but features are different than with audioverbal memory disorder. Instability of the acoustic basis of speech is not present, as patients clearly benefit from prompting with the first sound or syllable (phonemic priming). Every word is a code, or part of a classification or system of values. Since semantic schemes are disturbed, naming is abnormal. In affected or damaged cortex, the "law of strength" is disturbed and weak stimuli evoke similar responses as strong stimuli. A "flood of equally probable possibilities prevents the discovery of the required dominant word." (Luria 1972 Aphasia reconsidered, Cortex 1:1). So paraphasias are common. Tsvetkova (1972) noted the naming problem affects objects not actions. This study was based on reaction time to name qualities, actions, objects . In particular concrete objects are affected. Further , Tsvetkova found that visual representations of the objects were abnormal and drawings or descriptions showed unexpected defects.