This study examined the effect of varying the number of potential target wo
rds on amnesic patients' category exemplar production performance. In Exper
iment 1, 4 words from each of 6 categories were presented to amnesic patien
ts and normal control participants. This was followed by an indirect task i
n which each participant produced the first 8 words that came to mind when
presented with a category cue. On this task the amnesic patients were impai
red. This outcome stands in sharp contrast to most other category exemplar
production tasks that have been reported. However, these other paradigms te
nd to restrict participants' processing during target item presentation whi
le our procedure allowed them to analyze the target words as they chose. Ou
r procedure may have allowed the control participant more opportunity to "c
luster" target words from the same category during list presentation and th
is, in turn, may have given them an advantage at the time of category exemp
lar production. Therefore, in Experiment 2, only 1 word per category was pr
esented in the target list and only 2 words per category were requested dur
ing category exemplar production. Surprisingly, the amnesic patients still
exhibited impaired performance. Therefore, it was suggested that perhaps am
nesic patients' known inability to perform semantic levels of processing du
ring individual target word presentation may have resulted in impaired prim
ing for categorical features for these patients.