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Broca’s aphasia entails difficulty in understanding syntactically complex sentences, e.g., passive (P), object-cleft (OC), object-relative (OR) sentences as compared to their counterparts, i.e., active (A), subject-cleft (SC), and subject-relative (SR) sentences. One of the theories proposed to account for this deficit, the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH, Grodzinski, 2000), assumes an underlying difficulty in computing syntactic dependencies and the concomitant use of a “guessing strategy” that randomly assigns the role of Agent to the participants in the sentence. Seven patients with Broca’s aphasia were tested on the sentence comprehension test (SCT) of the Italian version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS, Cho-Reyes & Thompson, 2012). Syntactically complex sentences were significantly more impaired than their counterparts (P>A: p = .046; OC>SC: p < .001; OR>SR: p = .0015) at a group level. However, the analysis of single profiles reveals significant dissociation in accuracy patterns among P versus OC and OR sentences in two participants (PMA and LB), suggesting different underlying computational processes. In both participants, accuracy on P sentences in one case (PMA: 0%) and on OC and OR sentences in the other case (LB: 10%) is in contrast with the TDH-based predictions of “at chance” performance on sentences entailing syntactic movement.

Introduction. The Northwestern Assessment of Verb and Sentences (NAVS; Thompson, 2011) is a test battery that includes five tests aimed at assessing production and comprehension of verbs with different argument structure (AS) complexity and sentences with canonical/non-canonical order (i.e., active, passive, subject and object Wh-questions, and subject and object-relative structures). Both AS complexity and syntactic movement affect the performance of aphasic patients, particularly those with agrammatism, in both English (Thompson, 2003; Dickey et al.,2007) and Italian (Luzzatti et al., 2001, 2002; Barbieri et al., 2010). The present study reports preliminary data derived from an Italian version of the NAVS. Materials and methods. The original English version of the NAVS was translated and adapted into Italian. As part of this process, three verbs were replaced and – given the possible ambiguity in interpretation of Wh-questions due to the freer order of arguments in Italian as compared to English – subject-clefts and object-clefts were included in the Sentence Priming Production Test (SPPT) and the Sentence Comprehension Test (SCT) as replacements for Wh-questions. The test was computerized and items within each subtest were randomized to collect accuracy and reaction times (RT) on a group of healthy controls (N=21). A paper-and-pencil version of the test was then administered to a group of aphasic participants (N=18), following the same procedure as described in Cho-Reyes & Thompson (2012). Data were analyzed using multiple linear (for RT) and logistic (for accuracy) regression. Results and discussion. Controls’ performance was at ceiling for all subtests, with the exception of subject Wh-questions (82%) and object-cleft sentences (84%) on the SCT. On the Verb Naming Test (VNT), 3-place verbs elicited longer RTs than both 2-place and 1-place verbs (p=.004; p<.001), with no effect of argument optionality. Longer RTs were found for passive vs. active (p=.002)

I manuali di neurologia e neuropsicologia sono soliti datare l’esordio della storia dell'afasia con la comunicazione di Paul Broca sulla sede del linguaggio articolato nei lobi frontali (1861). Di fatto, Benton e Joynt (1960) hanno raccolto numerose osservazioni di pazienti afasici dalla tradizione medica greca, latina, medioevale, rinascimentale e dalla letteratura illuministica del XVIII secolo. In nessuno dei casi riportati, tuttavia, pare siano stati identificati gli elementi cruciali di un deficit di linguaggio di natura afasica, e cioè da un lato la distinzione tra deficit di linguaggio, deficit concettuali e deficit della realizzazione articolatoria, dall'altro, la relazione con una lesione dell’emisfero cerebrale sinistro. Nella prima parte di questo articolo si discutono le opere di due medici del XVI e XVII secolo, Johannes Schenck e Johannes Jacob Wepfer, i cui studi sono poco sconosciuti. Johannes Schenck (1530-1598) realizzò una raccolta di osservazioni cliniche dall’Antichità ai suoi contemporanei. Nel primo volume (Observationes medicae de capite humano, 1584) egli discusse l’intera patologia della testa e della faccia. Almeno 16 di queste osservazioni fanno riferimento a pazienti con deficit di linguaggio di tipo afasico. Johannes Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695) scrisse numerosi testi di neuroanatomia, sulla vascolarizzazione del cervello e sull’apoplessia. Raccolse una collezione di casi neurologici (Observationes medico-practicae de affectibus capitis internis & externis) che fu pubblicata postuma. In almeno 15 delle 222 osservazioni è descritta la presenza di deficit afasici. Come atteso, in quasi ogni caso questi sono conseguenti a lesioni nell’emisfero di sinistra. Wepfer non pare tuttavia riconoscere tale asimmetria. Nella seconda parte di questo articolo si riporteranno i dati dello straordinario studio di Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1825) che delineò i principi fondamentali della correlazione anatomo-funzionale in neuropsicologia e applicò tali p

Although it is widely accepted that nouns and verbs are functionally independent linguistic entities, it is less clear whether their processing recruits different brain areas. This issue is particularly relevant for those theories of lexical semantics (and, more in general, of cognition) that suggest the embodiment of abstract concepts, i.e., based strongly on perceptual and motoric representations. This paper presents a formal meta analysis of the neuroimaging evidence on noun and verb processing in order to address this dichotomy more effectively at the anatomical level. We used a hierarchical clustering algorithm that grouped fMRI/PET activation peaks solely on the basis of spatial proximity. Cluster specificity for grammatical class was then tested on the basis of the noun verb distribution of the activation peaks included in each cluster. 32 clusters were identified: three were associated with nouns across different tasks (in the right inferior temporal gyrus, the left angular gyrus, and the left inferior parietal gyrus); one with verbs across different tasks (in the posterior part of the right middle temporal gyrus); and three showed verb specificity in some tasks and noun specificity in others (in the left and right inferior frontal gyrus and the left insula). These results do not support the popular tenets that verb processing is predominantly based in the left frontal cortex and noun processing relies specifically on temporal regions; nor do they support the idea that verb lexical semantic representations are heavily based on embodied motoric information. Our findings suggest instead that the cerebral circuits deputed to noun and verb processing lie in close spatial proximity in a wide network including frontal, parietal, and temporal regions. The data also indicate a predominant – but not exclusive – left lateralization of the network.

The present study employs neglect dyslexia as an experimental model to study compound-word processing; in particular, it investigates whether compound constituents are hierarchically organized at mental level and addresses the possibility of whole-word representation. Seven Italian-speaking patients suffering from neglect dyslexia participated in a word naming task. Both left-headed (pescespada, swordfish) and right-headed (astronave, spaceship) Italian compound nouns were used as stimuli. Non-existent compounds, which were generated by substituting the leftmost constituent of a compound with an orthographically similar word (e.g., *pestespada, *plaguesword), were also employed. A significant headedness effect emerged in the group analysis: patients read left-headed compounds better than right-headed compounds. A significant lexicality effect was also found: the participants read real compounds better than their non-existent compound pairs. Moreover, logit mixed-effects analyses indicated a left-hand constituent frequency effect. Results are discussed in terms of hierarchical representation of compounds and direct access to compound lemma nodes.

Lexical‑semantic variables (such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition) have been studied extensively in neuropsychology to address the structure of the word production system. The evidence available on this issue is still rather controversial, mainly because of the very complex interrelations between lexical‑semantic variables. Moreover, it is not clear whether the results obtained in Indo‑European languages also hold in languages with a completely different structure and script, such as Chinese. The objective of the present study is to investigate this specific issue by studying the effect of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, visual complexity of the stimuli to be named, grammatical class and morphological structure in word and picture naming in Chinese. The effect of these variables on naming and reading accuracy of healthy and brain‑damaged individuals is evaluated using mixed‑effect models, a statistical technique that allows to model both fixed and random effects; this feature substantially enhances the statistical power of the technique, so that several variables – and their complex interrelations – can be handled effectively in a unique analysis. We found that grammatical class interacts consistently across tasks with morphological structure: all participants, both healthy and brain‑damaged, found simple nouns significantly easier to read and name than complex nouns, whereas simple and complex verbs were of comparable difficulty. We also found that imageability was a strong predictor in picture naming, but not in word naming, whereas the contrary held true for age of acquisition. These results are taken to indicate the existence of a morphological level of processing in the Chinese word production system, and that reading aloud may occur along a non‑semantic route (either lexical or sub‑lexical) in this language.

Two main approaches have been proposed to describe the production of morphologically complex word: some models conceive a direct access to full-form representations from the semantic system, while other architectures posit a lemma layer between the semantic system and a morpheme-based lexicon. In this study these hypotheses are compared by assessing the reading performance of a patient, GR, affected by deep dyslexia with reading impairment of non-words, function words and verbs, and semantic and morphological errors. We first tested the role of semantic properties in modulating morpheme access. 138 Italian nouns were employed as stimuli in a reading task: 43 derived nouns in which the root and the suffix have a transparent relation (as in the English noun “farmer”), 49 derived nouns in which the root and the suffix have an opaque relation (as in the English noun “corner”), and 46 pseudo-suffixed nouns with non-existent pseudo-roots (as in the English noun “pioneer”). Roots were frequently produced in both transparent and opaque stimuli; pseudo-suffixed words were equally impaired, but their pseudo-roots were never produced. In order to investigate the effect of the morpheme grammatical class, GR was also asked to read aloud a list of 80 Italian derived nouns, having either verb (“negazione”, negation, from “negare”, to deny) or noun (“occhiata”, glance, from “occhio”, eye) roots. GR’s performance was influenced by root grammatical classes: noun roots were reported more often than verb roots. Considered together, these results are in line with models positing (de)composition of derived words and a lemma-lexeme architecture.

Introduzione degli atti del convegno sulle interpretazioni. Brevi riflessioni sul rapporto bidirezionale tra fatto e norma, sul ruolo dell'interpretazione nel processo immaginativo del diritto e sulle possibili funzioni dell'interprete in una visione reticolare del diritto stesso

Background: The syntactic impairment which frequently emerges in aphasia is mostly due to damage to the ability to map thematic information to the corresponding verb argument structure (VAS). In agrammatic patients this disorder is usually associated with initiation difficulties. Aims: The present study describes a new technique for the rehabilitation of VAS deficits in the matrix clause. Methods & Procedure: The treatment is organized in six levels, and is based on a set of sentence lists of increasing VAS complexity. The efficacy of the treatment was tested on a sample of five chronic (more than one year post-onset) agrammatic patients and three chronic severe non-classifiable aphasic patients suffering from predominant impairment in mapping thematic information to the appropriate VAS. Two sentence list sets were employed: one for the evaluation and treatment phases and the other for the evaluation phase only. Improvement in performance on the first list indicates efficacy of the training program on the treated material, while improvement on the second list indicates generalization to untreated material. The treatment efficacy and generalization to other communicative conditions was also tested with a picture-naming task of nouns and verbs, a picture description task and a spontaneous speech sample (mean sentence length). The patients’ syntactic abilities were tested at the beginning and at the end of the treatment, and again after a six-to-twelve month follow-up. Outcomes & Results: Patients improved significantly on both lists (i.e., there was significant training effect as well as generalization effect to the untreated material) and on the verb-naming task, the picture description task, and on mean sentence length in spontaneous speech. The treatment effect was seen to be stable at the six-to-twelve month follow-up. Conclusions: The VAS training described in the present study is an efficacious technique for the treatment of severe syntactic impairments of the m

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which both compound and constituent lemma-nodes are involved in compound processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of both the compound and its constituents should play a role when performing tasks involving compound processing, e.g., compound-word reading. This issue is investigated in the present study through an assessment of the performance of a deep dyslexic patient (GR) in three compound-reading experiments. In the first experiment, Verb-Noun (VN) compound nouns (e.g., lavapiatti, “dishwasher”, lit. wash-dishes) were employed as stimuli, while in the second, VN compound stimuli were embedded in sentences, and were compared to paired verb phrases (e.g., lui lava piatti, “he washes dishes”). Position-specific effects were ruled out by means of a third experiment, which investigated the retrieval of Noun-Noun compounds (e.g., pescespada, “swordfish”, lit. fishsword). In experiment 1, GR made errors on the verb constituent more frequently than on the noun, an effect that did not emerge in Experiment 2: when embedded in sentences, VN compounds were read significantly better than verb-phrases and no grammatical-class effect emerged. In Experiment 3, the first and the second constituent were read with the same level of accuracy. The disproportionate impairment, which emerged in reading the verb component of nominal VN compounds, indicates that the grammatical properties of constituents are being retrieved, and thus confirms access to the constituent lemma-nodes. However, the results suggested a whole-word representation when compounds are embedded in sentences; since the sentence context affects the access to compounds through syntactic constraints, whole-word representation is arguably at the lemma level as well (multiplelemma representation). Experiment 3

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds. Significant interactions between constituentfrequencies, headedness and semantic transparency emerged, indicating facilitatory frequency effects for transparent and head-final compounds, thus highlighting the importance of the semantic and structural properties of the compounds in lexical access. In a second experiment, converging evidence was sought in an eye-tracking study. The compounds were embedded into sentence contexts, and fixation durations were measured. The results did in fact confirm the effect observed in the first experiment. The results are consistent with a multi-route model of compound processing, but also indicate the importance of a semantic route dedicated to the conceptual combination of constituent meanings.

This paper reports the case of a patient, M.P., who developed delusion of inanimate doubles, without Capgras syndrome, after traumatic brain injury. His delusional symptoms were studied longitudinally and the cognitive impairments associated with delusion were investigated. Data suggest that M.P. did 'perceive' the actual differences between doubles and originals rather than 'confabulate' them. The cognitive profile, characterized by retrograde episodic amnesia, but neither object processing impairment nor confabulations, supports this hypothesis. The study examines the nature of object misidentification based on Ellis' and Staton's account and proposes a new account based on concurrent unbiased retrieval of semantic memory traces and biased recollection of episodic memory traces.

It is generally held that noun processing is specifically sub‑served by temporal areas, while the neural underpinnings of verb processing are located in the frontal lobe. However, this view is now challenged by a significant body of evidence accumulated over the years. Moreover, the results obtained so far on the neural implementation of noun and verb processing appear to be quite inconsistent. The present review briefly describes and critically re‑considers the anatomo‑correlative, neuroimaging, MEG, TMS and cortical stimulation studies on nouns and verbs with the aim of assessing the consistency of their results, particularly within technique. The paper also addresses the question as to whether the inconsistency of the data could be due to the variety of the tasks used. However, it emerged that neither the different investigation techniques used nor the different cognitive tasks employed fully explain the variability of the data. In the final section we thus suggest that the main reason for the emergence of inconsistent data in this field is that the cerebral circuits underlying noun and verb processing are not spatially segregated, at least for the spatial resolution currently used in most neuroimaging studies.

Background: Although disproportionate impairment of noun or verb retrieval has been described on the basis of the evidence from several aphasic cases since the mid 1980s, with different theoretical frames being proposed to account for noun-verb dissociation, very few studies have dealt with this dissociation in spontaneous speech. Aims: The objectives of this study were to investigate (i) whether the dissociation also emerged in connected speech, and (ii) whether the analysis of patients' narratives could shed light on the functional damage underlying their grammatical-class-specific impairment. Methods & Procedures: Two non-fluent verb-impaired patients, two fluent verbimpaired patients, and three fluent noun-impaired patients participated in this study. Their noun-verb dissociation was preliminarily assessed through a picture-naming task, following which their spontaneous speech was collected and analysed using a single-case approach, taking into consideration both lexical productivity (as indicated by the number of different tokens produced by the patients) and lexical diversity (as indicated by the number of different types and stems used by the patients). Outcomes & Results: Non-fluent verb-impaired patients tended to produce a lower proportion of verb types than unimpaired control participants, as opposed to fluent verb-impaired patients, who produced a normal verb rate in their spontaneous speech on all counting procedures. One out of three fluent noun-impaired patients produced a lower proportion of noun tokens, types, and stems compared to normal speakers. Conclusions: The data presented in this paper indicate that noun-verb dissociation as assessed in picture-naming tasks might not emerge in spontaneous speech and indicates the need for the inclusion of a lemma level in models of word production that aims at explaining grammatical-class-specific impairments in people with aphasia

It is not clear from previous research (e.g., Caramazza et al., 1988; Deutsch et al., 1998; Frost et al., 1997) whether morphological stems that sub-serve the formation of both nouns and verbs (e.g., 'deal-') have a unique, grammatical class-independent representation in the visual word identification system, or rather feature two separate, grammatical-class specific representations. In a first experiment, participants were asked to read aloud nouns and verbs that were anticipated by morphologically-related primes belonging to the opposite grammatical class (e.g., partenza-PARTIRE, departure-TO LEAVE). In order to disambiguate genuine morphological priming from semantic facilitation, the same target words were also paired in a second condition with semantically related, but morphologically unrelated primes (e.g., viaggio-PARTIRE, trip-TO LEAVE). Morphological and semantic primes were contrasted with separate sets of control primes. The results showed reliable cross-class morphological priming. This effect was also shown to be independent from whether nouns primed verbs or vice versa, and from SOA (100 ms vs. 300 ms). In a second experiment, cross-class morphological priming was shown to emerge even when the related primes were compared with control words that shared their orthographic and phonological onset (e.g., abbraccio-ABBRACCIARE, (the) hug-to hug vs. abbazia-ABBRACCIARE, abbey-to hug), thus proving to hold independently of orthography and phonology.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the efficacy of the treatment for language and calculation disorders and for speech apraxia in vascular subjects. Only therapeutic methods that could be qualified as neuropsychological were taken into account. For language disorders, we searched the pertinent literature published from 1950 to August 31, 2007 by means of electronic data banks and we took into consideration the Cochrane review, and papers in Cicerone et al. and Cappa et al. systematic reviews. For acalculia we examined the literature from 1980 by carrying out research on electronic data banks; for speech apraxia, studies emerged from a search of PUBMED. Aphasia therapy has been clearly demonstrated efficacious in groups of subjects if sufficiently prolonged/intensive. Treatment for specific disorders (words and sentences processing, reading, writing) studied in series of single patients, though always efficacious, reaches a lower level of recommendation due to the lack of RCT. Only a few studies tackled the problem of efficacy in case of speech apraxia and calculation disorders. Results are positive but data are scanty. Efficacy of aphasia therapy seems well established in group of subjects and well-promising for speech apraxia and calculation disorders. It is suggested, however, that the term "aphasia" covers widely different impairments and that RCT are not the best instrument to evaluate efficacy; the importance of chronicity is underlined.

The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of pitch dimension in auditory–motor interaction. Several behavioural and brain imaging studies have shown that auditory processing of sounds can activate motor representations, an effect which is however elicited only by action-related sounds, i.e., sounds linked to a specific motor repertoire. Music provides an appropriate framework for further exploration of this issue. Three groups of participants (pianists, non-pianist musicians and non-musicians) were tested with a shape decision task where lefthand and right-hand responses were required; each visual stimulus was paired with an auditory task-irrelevant stimulus (high-pitched or low-pitched piano-timbre chords). Of the three groups, only pianists had longer reaction times for left-hand/high-pitched chords and right-hand/low-pitched chords associations. These findings are consistent with an auditory-motor effect elicited by pitch dimension, as only pianists show an interaction between motor responses and implicit pitch processing. This interaction is consistent with the canonical mapping of hand gestures and pitch dimension on the piano keyboard. The results are discussed within the ideo-motor theoretical framework offered by the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel et al. in Behav Brain Sci 24:849–937, 2001).

Lexical‐semantic variables such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition have long been studied in order to shed light on the cognitive processes underlying the performance of normal and aphasic speakers [1, 2]. However, little is known about the role of these variables in Chinese. Twenty Chinese aphasic patients (either fluent or non‐fluent) and twenty healthy individuals matched for age and education participated in this study. They were asked to read aloud written words and to name pictures of objects and actions. The probability of success on each item was estimated through mixed logit models (MLM) [3] on the basis of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, grammatical class (nouns vs. verbs), and morphological structure (simple vs. complex words). The use of MLM allowed us to assess the effects of the predictors: (i) more precisely, because of the reduction of the error variance; (ii) both in the whole sample of participants and in the individual subjects. The set of significant predictors differs in reading aloud and picture naming, with imageability playing an important role in the former task, and age of acquisition in the latter. More importantly, grammatical class, morphological structure, and their interaction turned out to be significant predictors in both task, indicating that simple nouns are much easier than complex nouns, but no difference arose between simple and complex verbs. These results will be discussed in the light of current models of lexical processing in Chinese [4] and compared to the results emerging from similar studies on Western languages [5]. References [1] Balota et al. (2004). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316. [2] Nickels & Howard (1995). Neuropsychologia, 33, 1281-1303. [3] Jaeger (2008). Journal of Memory and Language 59, 434-446. [4] Bi et al. (2007). Neuropsychologia, 45, 2660-2673. [5] Baayen et al. (2006). Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 496-512.

In reality decision tasks, subjects have to decide whether a picture represents a real or an unreal object: the visual features of the stimulus are compared with the visual representations of objects that have been seen previously, and stored in the so called “structural description system”; when matching occurs, the stimulus is recognized as real. One critical issue in cognitive neuropsychology is whether this system is a pre-semantic and isolated store, or whether it is connected to the semantic system or even integral to it. In the present study we set up an object decision task, where we manipulated the semantic and perceptual features of stimuli. We created a set of 200 line drawings, half real, and half not real, chimeric drawings. The two parts of chimeras were semantically related for half of the stimuli, and not semantically related for the other half. Twenty normal subjects (age range: 25-40, education: university degree) participated into the study. Reaction times and accuracy were recorded. Repeated measure ANOVA showed longer reaction times and lower accuracy for unreal with respect to real stimuli, and for semantically related with respect to unrelated chimeras. These results may be better explained in the view of an access to semantic information, when performing a reality decision task, rather than with the hypothesis of a pre-semantic locus for reality judgements