Grammatical dissociation during acquired childhood aphasia.
OBJECTIVE
We report the case of a 6-year-old female who suffered a left hemisphere stroke attributed to a genetically determined prothrombotic state. She presented a fluent speech pattern with selective difficulty in retrieving names but not verbs. An evaluation was designed to clarify whether her symptoms represented a specific impairment of name retrieval.


METHODS
The child undertook an experimental battery of visual naming tasks requiring the production of 52 nouns (belonging to nine different semantic categories) and 44 verbs. Her performance was compared with that of 12 healthy children, matched for age and IQ, attending a local kindergarten.


RESULTS
The child retrieved significantly more verbs than nouns (chi(2)=16.27, p<0.01) and had a significantly lower score in noun (t=-7.2, p<0.005), but not in verb retrieval than the comparison group. This pattern persisted when verbs and nouns were matched for oral word frequency, showing that the results could not be explained by stimuli difficulty.


CONCLUSIONS
To our knowledge, this is the first report of a grammatical dissociation in a child. It suggests that nouns and verbs are subject to different processing early in development, at least before the formal acquisition of grammar. It contradicts theories that postulate a common processing of different grammatical categories early in life.
Martins
Isabel Pavão
IP
Lisbon Faculty of Medicine, Language Research Laboratory, IMM, Lisbon, Portugal. labling@fm.ul.pt
Loureiro
Clara
C
Ramos
Sara
S
Moreno
Teresa
T
D000849:Anomia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D054022:Cerebrum / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D007807:Language Tests; D020127:Recovery of Function; D012660:Semantics; D020521:Stroke / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology