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Executive control is recruited for language processing, particularly in complex linguistic tasks. Although the issue of the existence of an executive control specific to language is still an open issue, there is much evidence that executively-demanding language tasks rely on domain-general rather than language-specific executive resources. Here, we addressed this issue by assessing verbal and non-verbal executive capacities in LG, an aphasic patient after a stroke. First, we showed that LG's performance was spared in all non-verbal tasks regardless of the executive demands. Second, by contrasting conditions of high and low executive demand in verbal tasks, we showed that LG was only impaired in verbal task with high executive demand. The performance dissociation between low and high executive demand conditions in the verbal domain, not observed in the non-verbal domain, shows that verbal executive control partly dissociates from non-verbal executive control. This language-specific executive disorder suggests that some executive processes might be language-specific.

Pointing is a communicative gesture that allows individuals to share information about surrounding objects with other humans. Patients with heterotopagnosia are specifically impaired in pointing to other humans' body parts but not in pointing to themselves or to objects. Here, we describe a female patient with heterotopagnosia who was more accurate in pointing to men's body parts than to women's body parts. We replicated this gender effect in healthy participants with faster reaction times for pointing to men's body parts than to women's body parts. We discuss the role of gender stereotypes in explaining why it is more difficult to point to women than to men.

In this paper, we study the link between the processing systems that sustain speech perception and production in a patient (F.A.) with conduction aphasia. Her pattern of performance in repetition task - quantitative but also qualitative striking difference in errors with pseudowords versus words - cannot be properly accounted for either by a perception deficit or by a production deficit. We discuss this finding according to theoretical models of phonological processing and show that it is best explained by an impaired ability to transfer phonological information from the perception to the production system. We also probed for a phonological link in the opposite direction, from the production to the perception system. F.A.'s results show that this link was not impaired. Overall, our results suggest that (a) the phonological codes in perception and in production are separate but connected by two conversion mechanisms and that (b) these two mechanisms can be disrupted independently.