Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology

2018 Edition

Anomic Aphasia

  • Anastasia RaymerEmail author
Reference work entry


Anomic aphasia is the language impairment that involves only word-finding difficulties or pure anomia in contrast to other forms of aphasia (Harnish 2015). Other language modalities typically are intact in anomic aphasia, including auditory comprehension of language, repetition of words and sentences, and spontaneous generation of sentences, yet struggle may be noted to retrieve words during sentence generation.

Current Knowledge

Anomic aphasia is a form of language disorder associated with acquired brain damage typically affecting the left cerebral hemisphere (Raymer 2011). Anomic aphasia can be manifest as a difficulty in retrieving specific intended words, often nouns, but sometimes verbs, during the course of sentence generation. The grammatical characteristics of the sentence remain intact. The moments of word retrieval difficulty lead to long pauses, insertion of filler words, or selection of wrong words (paraphasias) during conversation or other word retrieval...


References and Readings

  1. Goodglass, H., Kaplan, E., & Barresi, B. (2001). The assessment of aphasia and related disorders (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.Google Scholar
  2. Harnish, S. M. (2015). Anomia and anomic aphasia: Implications for lexical processing. In A. M. Raymer & L. G. Rothi (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of aphasia and language disorders. New York: Oxford Handbooks Online.Google Scholar
  3. Hoffmann, M., & Chen, R. (2013). The spectrum of aphasia subtypes and etiology in subacute stroke. Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease, 22, 1385–1392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. Laine, M., & Martin, N. (2006). Anomia: Theoretical and clinical aspects. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
  5. 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.Google Scholar
  6. Raymer, A. M. (2011). Naming and word retrieval problems. In L. L. LaPointe (Ed.), Aphasia and related neurogenic language disorders (4th ed., pp. 72–86). New York: Thieme.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Communication Disorders and Special EducationOld Dominion UniversityNorfolkUSA