We describe a brain-damaged patient whose comprehension of witten and spoken words is severly impaired : in genera, MP can only determine the superordinate category of a word and is unable to obtain a more precise semantic description. Her understanding of pictures, in contrast, was found to be much more detailed. Further investigation of this ability, however, revealed definite constraints on the nature of the semantic description that the patient could extract form pictures. MP has access to knoyledge of the basic-level concept for a picture (defined as the most inclusive member of a category for which a concrete image of the object as a whole can be formed), but appears unable to go beyond this level to compute subordinate information. In discussing the results, we evaluate possible differences in the way pictures and words are normally processed for meaning.