Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and the animate/inanimate effect

Abstract

We report an aphasic patient, Z.B.L., who showed a significant advantage for verbs compared to nouns in picture-naming tests. Within the object class, he performed better on animate things than on nonliving things in picture naming as well as in an “attribute judgement task”. This pattern of performance is contrary to the central prediction of a recent proposal (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), which attributes noun–verb dissociation in aphasic patients to deficits in processing certain kinds of semantic features. This model proposes that conceptual representations of verbs have a lower proportion of sensory features than do representations of nouns; the same is proposed for inanimate versus animate items within the noun category. Noun deficits are assumed to arise due to impairment for the processing of sensory features. The model predicts that if a patient is more impaired for nouns than for verbs, he will also display more difficulty with animate than with inanimate objects. Contrary to predications derived from this theory, Z.B.L. performed better with animate than inanimate nouns.

Acknowledgments

The research reported here was supported in part by the Sackler Scholars Program in Psychobiology to YB, NIH Grant DC 04542 to AC, and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (7052035) to HS. We thank Jennifer Shelton for providing the “central attribute judgement” test, Xiaoli Bai for referring Z.B.L. to us and making possible the test administration, Gabriele Miceli for his help in reading MRI scans, and Kevin Shapiro for helpful discussions. We are most grateful to Z.B.L. for his participation. This study has been presented at the annual meeting of Academy of Aphasia in Amsterdam, 2005; the proceedings of that conference presentation are to appear in a special issue of the journal Brain and Language

Notes

¹ In Mandarin Chinese, morphological inflection is virtually absent; nouns and verbs do not undergo morphological changes in different syntactic/semantic contexts. It is thus difficult to construct tasks that explicitly test morphological operations in Chinese.