On the assessment of grammatical gender knowledge in aphasia: The danger of relying on explicit, metalinguistic tasks

Abstract

We report the case of a bilingual Italian-English aphasic patient, ED, who was very poor at categorising Italian nouns for grammatical gender in explicit, metalinguistic tasks, and was at chance when gender could not be inferred from the word's phonology. In contrast, ED showed a good ability to modify adjectives to match the gender of nouns in a task that involved translating adjective-noun phrases from English into Italian. Access to wordspecific gender knowledge in aphasic patients should not be tested solely by means of tasks requiring explicit gender judgements but should be assessed using tasks that come as close as possible to the circumstances of natural language processing.