Retrieval inhibition in anomia.

Reading latencies for anomic temporal lobe epileptics, nonanomic epileptic patient controls, and normal controls were measured in semantic priming paradigms. Both the epileptic controls and the normal controls showed typical semantic facilitation with faster response times following related than unrelated primes. The anomic subjects, on the other hand, were much slower to read targets following presentation of semantically related items than following unrelated primes. This inhibition effect was seen to increase as the number of related primes increased. These patterns were observed both when picture primes (Experiment 1) and word primes (Experiment 2) were used. These findings were interpreted as evidence for a category-specific retrieval inhibition in the anomic epileptic subjects.