A case of selective difficulty in writing verbs

We describe the case of an individual who exhibited a selective difficulty in writing verbs. We document the pattern in a series of tasks and rule out the possibility that the results can be accounted for: (a) by the fact that writing times are typically slower than speaking times, (b) by the possibility that verb effects were obscured in spoken naming, due to ceiling level performance, or (c) that the written verb forms themselves are especially difficult for the written production system. We discuss the implications that modality specific grammatical category deficits such as this one have for the traditional view that grammatical category distinctions exist at an exclusively amodal level of lexical knowledge. In addition we relate our findings to what is known about the neuroanatomical localization of noun/verb knowledge.