Noun–verb dissociation in aphasia: The role of imageability and functional locus of the lesion

• Published in: Neuropsychologia 2006, Vol.44 (1), p.73-89
• Main Authors: Crepaldi, Davide, Aggujaro, Silvia, Arduino, Lisa Saskia, Zonca, Giusy, Ghirardi, Graziella, Inzaghi, Maria Grazia, Colombo, Mariarosa, Chierchia, Gennaro, Luzzatti, Claudio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Analysis of Variance; Anomia; Aphasia; Aphasia - physiopathology; Argument structure; Biological and medical sciences; Brain; Disorders of higher nervous function. Focal brain diseases. Central vestibular syndrome and deafness. Brain stem syndromes; Dissociative Disorders - physiopathology; Female; Grammatical class; Humans; Imageability; Imagination - physiology; Language; Language and communication disorders; Language disorders; Lexical retrieval; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Models, Psychological; Nervous system (semeiology, syndromes); Neurology; Neuropsychological Tests - statistics & numerical data; Nouns; Noun–verb dissociation; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Regression Analysis; Reproducibility of Results; Semantic processing; Verbal Behavior - physiology; Verbs; Word Association Tests - statistics & numerical data
• ISSN: 0028-3932; 1873-3514
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.04.006

Aphasic patients occasionally manifest a dissociated naming ability between objects and actions: this phenomenon has been interpreted as evidence of a separate organization for nouns and verbs in the mental lexicon. Nevertheless Bird et al. [Bird, H., Howard, D., Franklin, S. (2000). Why is a verb like an inanimate object? Grammatical category and semantic category deficits. Brain and Language, 72, 246–309], suggested that the damage underlying noun–verb dissociation affects the corresponding semantic concepts and not the lexical representation of words; moreover, they claimed that many dissociations reported in literature are caused merely by a strong imageability effect. In fact, most authors used a picture-naming task to assess patients’ naming ability, and due to the fact that this test involves the use of pictures to represent actions and objects, nouns were frequently more imageable than verbs [Luzzatti, C., & Chierchia, G. (2002). On the nature of selective deficit involving nouns and verbs. Rivista di Linguistica, 14, 43–71]. In order to overcome this drawback, we devised a new task – nouns and verbs retrieval in a sentence context (NVR-SC) – in which nouns and verbs have the same imageability rate. Patients’ performance on this task is compared with that obtained by the same patients on a standard picture-naming task. Of the 16 aphasic patients with a selective verb deficit, as revealed by the picture-naming task, two continued to show dissociation in the NVR-SC task, while 14 did not. The data indicate that at least some patients have an imageability-independent lexical deficit for verbs. The functional locus/i of the damage is also considered, with particular reference to the lemma/ lexeme dichotomy suggested by Levelt et al. [Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75].