title: Why is "Red Cross" different from "Yellow Cross"?: a neuropsychological study of noun-adjective agreement within Italian compounds.
abstract: This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun-adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun-adjective vs adjective-noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds. These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level.
authors.affiliation: Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy. sara.mondini@unipd.it
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mondini
authors.forename: Gonia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Jarema
authors.forename: Claudio
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Luzzatti
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Burani
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Semenza
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000175:diagnosis*; D004411:Dyslexia, Acquired / Q000175:diagnosis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009484:Neuropsychology / Q000379:methods*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014825:Vocabulary