The selective preservation of colour naming in semantic dementia.

This paper documents a series of seven patients with semantic dementia who showed a selective preservation in colour naming. This was in the context of a pervasive impairment in naming nouns across a wide range of other semantic categories. To our knowledge, this is the first series of patients with semantic dementia documenting a selective preservation of colour naming. These findings are discussed in the light of current theoretical accounts of category-specific effects and the possible contribution of imageability to this selective preservation of colours.