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Confrontation naming is impaired in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and corticobasal degeneration (CBD). Some behavioural observations suggest a common source of impaired naming across these patient groups, while others find partially unique patterns of naming difficulty. We hypothesized that a large‐scale neural network underlies naming, and that patterns of impaired naming in AD, FTD and CBD reflect cortical atrophy that interrupts this network in a manner that is partially shared and partially unique across these patient groups. We tested this hypothesis by correlating naming impairments with voxel‐based morphometric (VBM) analyses of cortical atrophy in structural MRIs of 50 patients. We found significant naming deficits in all patient groups. Naming also correlated with lexical retrieval in all patient groups, including subgroups of patients …