Speaking of events: The case of C.M.

Abstract

C.M. is an agrammatic patient who on assessment tests shows a disproportionate difficulty when producing verbs compared with nouns. In three experiments, we investigated whether C.M. also has difficulties with nouns referring to events and whether event nouns and verbs show similar patterns of disruption. Experiment 1 suggested that she is sensitive to argument structure complexity and has a greater impairment in the production of event nouns and verbs than object nouns. Experiment 2 revealed that C.M. finds derivationally complex words, such as event nouns, difficult to produce. However, morphological complexity does not completely explain C.M.'s problems with event nouns. In Experiment 3, an assessment of C.M.'s ability to use different aspects of semantic and syntactic knowledge relative to event nouns and verbs showed an almost identical performance with the two types of words. The relevance of the findings with respect to models of word production is considered.

Keywords:

• Noun/verb dissociation
• Event words
• Word production

Acknowledgments

This paper was supported by a Human Frontier Science Program Grant RGO148/2000-B and by PRIN 2003. We thank Cristina Burani, Sergio Carlomagno, Judit Druks, Alessandro Laudanna, Giuseppe Longobardi, Michael Siegal, and Brendan Weeks for their helpful comments. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers who helped us to improve the initial version of this paper.

Notes

¹ Event is used here to refer in a general fashion to processes, states, or events alike.

² Arguments are obligatory for nouns as well as for verbs. When they are not expressed they are retrievable from context (Graffi, 1990).

³ The study is not concerned with the possible differences between spoken and written language, and the claims concern the acoustic/phonological modality only.