Grammatical class in word and sentence production: Evidence from an aphasic patient

This study reports an unusual pattern of selective verb impairment shown by an aphasic patient following a left-hemisphere cerebrovascular accident. In action/object naming, comparable levels of impairment of verb production compared to noun production were found for spoken and written responses; this verb impairment was attenuated by provision of a spoken sentence fragment to be completed. In contrast, tasks that required the patient to produce an entire sentence elicited a marked divergence of spoken and written verb production. Verb retrieval in written (but not spoken) sentences was poor relative to action naming and showed inappropriate use in grammatical context along with problems with inflection. These results present challenges to existing models of the representation of grammatical class within the lexicon. (C) 2000 Academic Press.