title: The breakdown of word meanings in aphasia.
abstract: The present study evaluates an explanation of agrammatism that involves the conceptual distinction between nouns and predicative terms. It was argued that the degraded production of verbs relative to nouns that is characteristic of agrammatic speech reflects a selective disruption in the mental representation of predicative concepts. The data from a sorting task were consistent with a set of experimental predictions derived from this explanation and suggest that a satisfactory explanation of agrammatism should involve semantic variables in addition to syntactic ones.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000523:psychology; D001041:Aphasia, Wernicke / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008875:Middle Aged; D011932:Reading; D013067:Speech Perception