Naming of Nouns and Verbs in Aphasia: Preliminary results of a word retrieval task in a sentence context

INTRODUCTION Several authors described cases of dissociated impairment in naming nouns and verbs. There are four main accounts of this dissociation: (i) patients may have purely lexical damage which selectively affects verbs or nouns at a late stage of the linguistic processing (phonological or orthographic lexicons) (Rapp & Caramazza, 2002); (ii) the damage affects a lexical device, either at an ortographic-phonological modality-specific level or at a unitary lexical-syntactic level (Levelt et al., 1999; Berndt et al., 1997); (iii) N-V dissociation is not a lexical but a semantic phenomenon (Bird, Howard & Franklin, 2000); (iv) N-V dissociation is due to syntactic damages (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 2000). To disentangle imageability and grammatical class effects, a new task was developed that allowed to elicit Ns and Vs in a sentence context. The results obtained will permit to address the following three questions: Does imageability play a role in determining N-V