how to display (array) custom terms?

I’m using comment tags. They are stored in the wpdb terms table and assigned taxonomy/relationships in the same way as terms for CATEGORY and TAGS. The only difference is that these COMMENT TAG terms are given the taxonomy value comment_tag in the term_taxonomy table, as opposed to category or post_tag. How can I fetch the term names (i.e. term_taxonomy -> taxonomy -> comment_tag) associated with the post, as an array? Do I need to add a new modified taxonomy function or can I use existing template tags for a query? Thanks in advance for your help…