Retrieval of nouns and verbs in agrammatism and anomia

Abstract

The ability of five agrammatic and five anomic aphasic patients to produce nouns and verbs was assessed in four tasks. Target words were form class unambiguous, frequency and length matched nouns and verbs, elicited as single words in picture naming and naming-to-definition tasks. The same unambiguous verbs were targets in an action description task. Narrative speech was obtained from each patient using a story elicitation procedure. Agrammatic aphasics produced significantly fewer verbs than nouns, relative to other groups, in all tasks. Anomic aphasics reliably produced more verbs than nouns in naming to definition. These results replicate previous findings for Italian-speaking patient groups, and for several individual cases. In addition, these results extend the relative verb deficit among agrammatic patients to connected speech tasks. Results are interpreted in light of current models of lexical and sentence production.