Verbs and nouns—a review of the literature

Abstract

The processing of verbs and differences in the availability of verbs and nouns has recently become a topic of interest among psycholinguists, researchers into language acquisition and aphasiologists. The present paper provides a detailed review of the literature during the last decade devoted to verb/noun differences and verb processing in aphasia patients. The first part of the review discusses three topics. The first is the relationship between verb/noun deficits and diagnostic categories such as Broca's aphasia and anomia. The second discusses studies that assume that verb/noun differences are lexical and evaluate the evidence concerning the level(s) on current models of lexical processing at which verb/noun differences might occur. The third deals with studies that argue that verb/noun differences derive from semantic differences and are reducible to imageability effects or to loss of functional or perceptual features. The second part of the paper discusses the literature devoted to verbs. It contains a short tutorial on arguments, stucture of verbs and their structural realization (syntactic subcategorization) and provides a critical account of the studies that relate verb deficits to their argument structure. Finally, studies devoted to verb semantics are discussed.