When one can write SALTO as noun but not as verb: A grammatical category-specific, modality-specific deficit

Abstract

We report the naming performance of a Spanish patient (AQF) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). AQF’s performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with poorer performance in verb than in noun naming. Furthermore, this dissociation was only present in written naming. Importantly, the patient’s dissociation between nouns and verbs was present also when we studied her performance with homonymous words. We argue that this dissociation is not due to a range of semantic factors but is a true grammatical category-specific deficit located at the lexical level of orthographic processing. Thus, we bring in new evidence in favour of grammatical category representation at a post-semantic level where output modalities are represented separately.