Synonyms
Naming impairments; Word-finding difficulties
Definition
Anomia generally refers to instances of word-finding difficulty that occur during the course of conversational discourse. It is often documented clinically in confrontation picture-naming tasks.
Current Knowledge
Anomia can occur in healthy individuals who occasionally experience difficulty retrieving an intended word during a conversation, also known as the tip-of-the-tongue state (Biedermann et al. 2008). It is a frequent occurrence in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage and aphasia (Raymer 2011). Typically associated with difficulties for nouns, anomia also can refer to difficulties in retrieving other classes of words, such as verbs and adjectives. Anomia arises from failure at any stage in the complex series of lexical processes engaged in word retrieval, including activation of semantic representations for the meaning to be conveyed and phonological representations for the form of the word to express...
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References and Readings
Biedermann, B., Ruh, N., Nickels, L., & Coltheart, M. (2008). Information retrieval in tip of the tongue states: New data and methodological advances. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 37, 171–198.
Laine, M., & Martin, N. (2006). Anomia: Theoretical and clinical aspects. New York: Psychology Press.
Race, D. C., & Hillis, A. E. (2015). The neural mechanisms underlying naming. In A. E. Hillis (Ed.), The handbook of adult language disorders (pp. 151–160). New York: Psychology Press.
Raymer, A. M. (2011). Naming and word retrieval problems. In L. L. LaPointe (Ed.), Aphasia and related neurogenic language disorders (4th ed., pp. 95–110). New York: Thieme Medical Publishers.
Tippett, D. C., & Hillis, A. E. (2015). The cognitive processes underlying naming. In A. E. Hillis (Ed.), The handbook of adult language disorders (pp. 141–150). New York: Psychology Press.
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Raymer, A. (2018). Anomia. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_857
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_857
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