Speech perception
Agnosia is "the loss or diminution of the ability to recognize familiar objects or stimuli usually as a result of brain damage". There are several different kinds of agnosia that affect every one of our senses, but the two most common related to speech are speech agnosia and phonagnosia.
Associative visual agnosia
Teuber described the associative agnostic as having a "percept stripped of its meaning," because the afflicted individual cannot generate unique semantic information to identify the percept, since though it is fully formed, it fails to activate the semantic memory associated with the stimulus. Warrington (1975) offered that the problem lies in impaired access to generic engrams (memory traces) that describe categories of objects made up of a multitude of similar elements. Essentially, damage to a modality-specific meaning process (semantic system), is proposed, either in terms of defective access to or a degradation of semantic memory store for visual semantic representations themselves. The fact that agnosias are often restricted to impairments of particular types of stimuli, within distinct sensory modalities, suggests that there are separate modality specific pathways for the meaningful representation of objects and pictures, written material, familiar faces, and colors.