On the basis of neuropsychological and functional imaging evidence, meaning and grammatical class (particularly the verb-noun distinction) have been proposed as organizational principles of linguistic knowledge in the brain. However, previous studies investigating verb and noun processing have been confounded by the presence of systematic correlations between word meaning and grammatical class....

This study investigates grammatical gender and number processing marked on clitic pronouns in native Spanish speakers and in late English-Spanish bilinguals using ERPs. Spanish clitic pronouns were chosen as a critical grammatical structure which is absent in English, and which encodes both grammatical gender and number. Number, but not grammatical gender, is present in English, making this str...

Selective noun or verb deficits in word production observed in some aphasic patients have helped us understand how grammatical knowledge is represented in the brain (e.g., Bi, Han, Shu, & Caramazza, 2007; Caramazza & Hillis, 1991; see reviews in Laiacona & Caramazza, 2004; Shapiro & Caramazza, 2003a). It has been shown that such patients are not a coherent group but are produced by various caus...