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The purpose of this study was to describe the social isolation of older adults in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood (Montreal, Canada) from the perspectives of older adults and community stakeholders. To do so, a descriptive qualitative study was conducted, involving community-dwelling older adults and a variety of key stakeholders from the neighbourhood. Seven focus groups were held, with a total of 37 participants. Focus group transcripts were analyzed using the approach of Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña. Participants reported that social isolation of older adults is characterized by gaps in social interactions (scarcity of social interactions, lack of social support, and unsatisfying relationships) as well as by low social participation that can be depicted in three ways: (1) exclusion by society, (2) self-restriction of participation, and (3) low eagerness to socialize. This study highlights that there is a diversity in how social isolation of older adults manifests itself. It can be the result of a deliberate choice (or not), as well as being desired (or not). These aspects of the phenomenon of social isolation of older adults are still not well described. However, they offer relevant avenues for rethinking approaches to intervention development.

Cognitive Reserve (CR) refers to cognitive resources acquired through experiences along the lifespan that allow for flexibility in coping with neurocognitive changes. Investigating the role of CR measures across well-established psycholinguistic features can provide new insight into how CR interplays with cognition. Sixty-five Italian older adults performed a Lexical Decision, a Semantic Matching and a Sentence Reading task. We observed the effects of CR on reaction times and accuracy while varying lexical frequency (high vs low) and lexical semantics (concrete vs abstract) and on reading times of sentences with either syntactic or semantic violations. In the Lexical Decision and Semantic Matching tasks, CR played a role in processing low frequency and abstract words. In the Sentence Reading Task, CR influenced reading times, particularly in the presence of syntactic violations. CR predicts cognitive performance in tasks that require language demands at different levels.

This study investigates the effect of stress change during compound processing in Modern Greek. Twenty-five native speakers were tested in a cross-modal lexical decision task and a naming task in order to test for performance differences across stress-change vs. non-stress-change compounds. No statistically significant difference was found for the lexical decision task. However, the naming task showed a significant effect of stress change in compound processing, with the production of non-stress-change compounds showing facilitation. These results indicate that stress change is reflected in compound processing in Greek and underscore the importance of considering the interplay between specific tasks and the computational role of linguistic features.

This novel study explores language processing in a real-world context, namely walking in a street. It combines performing lexicality judgments while walking on a self-paced treadmill in a virtual environment that simulates the real world to create a dual-task paradigm to evaluate cognitive-motor interference in older adults and healthy young individuals.

An acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim’s collaboration.

Background: Derived words have constituted an important bridge between aphasiology and psycholinguistics by addressing the extent to which morphology affects representation and processing in the mind/brain.Aims: Our goal was to assess how properties of whole words and their overlapping substrings affect the manner in which English derivationally suffixed words are recognised and produced.Methods & Procedures: We probed the processing of multimorphemic words containing strings of two derivational suffixes by healthy adult participants, employing both a progressive demasking naming task and a typing task. The progressive demasking paradigm that we employed integrates word recognition and production by requiring that a participant recognises a progressively demasked stimulus and then say it as quickly as possible. The typing task allowed us to focus on segment by segment aspects of processing during production by enabling us to construct per-letter typing times for each region of a word.Outcomes & Re...

We explored the way grammatical gender is represented in the bilingual mental lexicon in order to determine whether the grammatical gender of the first language (L1) affects the production of nouns in the second language (L2). Furthermore, we explored the representation of the Romanian “neuter” gender to see if it is distinct from the masculine and feminine. Romanian-French bilinguals were tested using a picture-naming task in L2 (Experiments 1 and 2) and a translation task from L1 to L2 (Experiment 3). Participants had to use either a bare noun (Condition 1) or a noun phrase (Condition 2). Responses were faster on gender congruent than on gender incongruent stimuli in both conditions, and neuter was found to be distinct from masculine and feminine. These results suggest that grammatical gender information is available at the level of lexical representation and that the bilingual lexicon is structured in a manner that allows information from the lexical level of both languages to interact. They also point to a tripartite gender system in Romanian.

Cette étude investigue l'interaction entre les systèmes dugenre grammatical chez les bilingues roumain-français afin de déterminer quels facteurs (déterminants cognats, nombre) modulent cette interaction et à quel niveau du lexique mental. Cette étude analyse également les caractéristiques du genre neutre roumain dont le statut est encore sujet à débat. 11 bilingues roumain-français (20 à 35 ans) et 8 monolingues francophones, (20 à 35 ans) ont participé à l’étude. Une tâche de dénomination en français de 120 images regroupant différents facteurs (cognats, pluriel, genre grammatical) leur a été proposée. Ils devaient les nommer dans trois conditions, à savoir, nom seul, avec déterminant défini et avec déterminant indéfini. Le temps de réponse (TR) était enregistré. Les résultats, analysés par ANOVA, ont montré un effet de facilitation de cognats et des tendances vers un effet de congruence du genre et vers une interaction entre la congruence du genre et l'effet de cognat. Ils ont également démontré des tendances à considérer le neutre roumain comme un genre à part. Ces résultats indiquent la possibilité d'une interaction des systèmes du genre grammatical chez le bilingue et une implication du niveau lexical dans cette interaction. Ces résultats, ainsi que des avenues futures, seront discutés.

Theoretical accounts of Greek compounds argue for a close relation between their stress properties and their underlying structure. Compounds that preserve and receive stress at the same position as their second constituent are analyzed as stem-word constructions, while those that receive antepenultimate stress are viewed as belonging to the stem-stem category. Using an auditory lexical decision task, we examine the effect of stress change on the processing of compounds in the light of existing theoretical linguistic accounts. Although our experimental results do not reach statistical significance, we believe that they are informative of the cognitive status and role of stress in compound processing. Finally, they relate to existing theories of compounding in Greek and reflect the complex interaction of the psycholinguistic effects of stress and the structural properties of these constructions. Resume: Les explications theoriques des mots composes grecs affirment qu’il existe une relation etroite entre l’accent et la structure sous-jacente de ces mots. Les composes qui preservent et recoivent l’accent a la meme position que leur deuxieme constituant sont analyses en mot-racine, alors que ceux qui portent l’accent a la position antepenultieme appartiennent a la categorie racine-racine. A l’aide d’une tâche de decision lexicale auditoire, nous examinons l’effet qu’a le changement de la position de l’accent sur le traitement des composes, etant donne les explications theoriques actuelles. Meme si nos resultats experimentaux ne sont pas statistiquement significatifs, nous les croyons informatifs pour l’etude du statut cognitif et du role de l’accent dans le traitement des mots composes. Enfin, nos resultats sont lies aux theories actuelles de la composition en grec et ils refletent l’interaction complexe entre les effets psycholinguistiques de l’accent et les proprietes structurales des composes.

Cognitive reserve could be defined as the accumulation of experiences, abilities, knowledge and changes that occur throughout the lifespan. One of the most difficult changes in life is the experience of emigrating to a foreign country.The present investigation aimed to compare the cognitive reserve of two paired groups of elderly: Italians living in Italy and Italians who in adult age (around 20 years) emigrated to Montreal. Both groups attended the same years of school, in Italy.Cognitive reserve was measured in the two groups by a structured and standardised questionnaire, the cognitive reserve questionnaire.Cognitive reserve showed to be significantly higher in the Italian-Canadian individuals (i.e. Italians who emigrated).Emigration might act as an environmental factor that enriches people's lifestyle and reflects itself in the amount of their cognitive reserve.

Sentences such as The author started the book are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun book to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) or at the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG). These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus (STG), the right inferior frontal gyrus (R-IFG), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), more so than control sentences (The author wrote the book). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences (…drank the book) and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion.

Background: Few studies have investigated how individuals diagnosed with post-stroke Broca’s aphasia decompose words into their constituent morphemes in real-time processing. Previous research has focused on morphologically complex words in non-time-constrained settings or in syntactic frames, but not in the lexicon.Aims: We examined real-time processing of morphologically complex words in a group of five Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia to determine: (1) whether their morphological decomposition mechanisms are sensitive to lexical (orthography and frequency) vs. morphological (stem-suffix combinatory features) factors during visual word recognition, (2) whether these mechanisms are different in inflected vs. derived forms during lexical access, and (3) whether there is a preferred unit of lexical access (syllables vs. morphemes) for inflected vs. derived forms.Methods & Procedures: The study included two real-time experiments. The first was a semantic judgment task necessitating participan...

Background: While converging evidence has led to the view that people with aphasia exploit compositional procedures when producing compound words, the issue of what compound‐internal characteristics are at play during these procedures is still under debate. It has been argued that constituent position and/or morphosyntactic prominence, i.e., being the head constituent of a compound, may influence the manner in which compounds are accessed. However, findings obtained from patient performances are thus far inconclusive, because positional and headedness effects are frequently confounded in a language. Aims: In order to disentangle position‐in‐the‐string and headedness effects in compound production in aphasia, the main objective of this study is to investigate the performance of bilingual patients speaking languages in which these effects can be teased apart. Our secondary goal is to probe the roles of grammatical category (adjectives vs nouns) and of between‐language phonological similarity, as both these ...

In the present study we use a cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming paradigm to examine the influence on word recognition of phonological/orthographic variation between morphologically related nouns. We exploit particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Polish, in which consonantal stem-boundary (portre/tɕ/e-portre/t/ ‘portrait’) and vocalic stem-internal (obr/ɔ/tem-obr/u/t ‘turn’) alternations occur. The impact of morphological relatedness was measured against an orthographic and an unrelated baseline condition. Invariant magnitudes of morphological facilitation arose across the two baseline conditions. More importantly, non-alternating as well as alternating morphological relatives showed robust facilitation. When comparing items featuring predictable stem-boundary change only and those featuring the stem-boundary and vocalic stem-internal changes, effects of morphological relatedness did not interact with degree of phonological/orthographic variation. We argue that morphological facilitation survives accross styles of alternation that vary from language to language.

Although lexicosemantic deficits are not typically seen in older adults, some studies indicate that age-related changes in semantic processing may occur. We had groups of older and younger adults perform speeded lexical decision on mass (e.g., honey), count (e.g., car), and dual nouns, which may be either mass or count (e.g., lamb). Singular dual nouns engendered significantly faster response times in older adults than mass and count nouns, whereas younger adults manifested similar response times to count and dual nouns. These results point toward a three-way distinction in the lexicon between mass, count, and dual nouns. Older adults appear to treat a larger set of nouns as dual than do younger adults. This may be due to awareness of the mass/count ambiguity present in a greater number of lexical items, as a result of their greater linguistic experience. Alternatively, in order to conserve processing resources, older adults may not activate mass/count information when recognizing a dual noun unless a mass or count reading is forced by context. Resume Meme si les deficits lexicosemantiques ne sont par releves de facon systematique chez les adultes plus âges, certaines etudes revelent que des changements lies a l'âge dans le traitement semantique peuvent se produire. Nous avons demande a des groupes d'adultes plus jeunes et plus âges d'effectuer des decisions lexicales accelerees relativement a la masse (p.ex. le miel), le denombrement (p. ex. les voitures) et les noms doubles, qui peuvent concerner soit la masse ou le nombre (p. ex. agneau). Les noms doubles singuliers ont entraine des temps de reponse significativement plus courts chez les adultes plus âges que les noms de masse ou de denombrement, alors que les adultes plus jeunes manifestaient des temps de reponse semblables pour les noms de denombrement et de masse. Ces resultats semblent demontrer une distinction a trois voies dans le lexique entre la masse, le denombrement et les noms doubles. Les adultes plus âges semblent traiter un ensemble de noms comme double davantage que ne le font les adultes plus jeunes. Cela pourrait etre cause par une sensibilisation a l'ambiguite dans la masse/denombrement qui se trouve dans un plus grand nombre de termes lexicaux, en consequence de leur plus grande experience linguistique. En revanche, afin d'economiser leurs ressources de traitement, les adultes plus âges pourraient ne pas activer l'information sur la masse/denombrement lorsqu'ils reconnaissent un nom double a moins qu'une lecture de masse ou de denombrement ne soit forcee par le contexte. A considerable body of research on aging has revealed that various aspects of cognitive function are subject to age-related decline. These decrements appear in a variety of tasks, including memory tasks that require self-initiated processing, such as cued and free recall (Park, 2000) and tasks tapping into episodic memory (Burke, MacKay, & James, 2000; Light, 1996; Wingfield & Stine-Morrow, 2000; for a review, see Craik, 2000). Older adults also manifest deficits in certain language tasks, such as word-finding difficulty (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 199D and difficulty in retrieving proper names (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986; Maylor, 1990). There are, however, aspects of cognitive processing that appear to be well-preserved in healthy older adults. They are not typically thought to exhibit impairments on tasks that reflect the organization of lexicosemantic knowledge, such as generation of word associations (Bowles, Williams, & Poon, 1983; Burke & Peters, 1986; Lovelace & Cooley, 1982) and category exemplars (Howard, 1980). Likewise, online studies examining lexicosemantic processing have shown similar response patterns in older and younger adults. For example, frequency has been found to have similar effects on lexical decision in the two populations, although overall reaction times (RTs) are somewhat slower in older adults (Alien, Madden, & Crozier 1991; Alien, Madden, Weber, & Groth, 1993; Tainturier, Tremblay, & Lecours, 1989). …

The present study examines on-line processing of mass nouns (e.g. honey), count nouns (e.g. table) and dual (metonymic) nouns (e.g. chicken) in healthy elderly controls with no evidence of cognitive impairment, patients suffering from probable Alzheimer's disease (pAD), and patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Participants performed a lexical decision task using a go/no-go paradigm, where they responded to words but not non-words. Within-group comparisons revealed that elderly controls manifested longer reaction times to mass nouns and count nouns than to dual nouns, while pAD and MCI patients manifested longer latencies to mass nouns, but no significant difference between count and dual nouns. The way in which lexicosemantic knowledge breaks down in the case of memory impairment is discussed, and it is argued that breakdown in lexical representations may provide a sensitive early measure of cognitive impairment.

The present study investigates the on-line performance of a non-fluent Bulgarian-speaking aphasic patient and nine matched control participants in the recognition of prefixed verbs. A visual primed lexical decision experiment was employed to probe the role of aspect, semantic transparency, and root status (free vs. bound) in the recognition patterns obtained. Controls' results showed aspect and transparency effects. The patient demonstrated facilitation for verb forms featuring bound roots, while showing inhibition on transparent forms with free-standing roots, pointing to difficulties with decomposition, but not with accessing stored forms. These results suggest that the patient had a problem at the level of morphological decomposition-based mechanisms.

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls'. Results also indicate that the type of suffix on the verb affects controls and DLI participants differently in their accuracy rates: DLI participants exhibit higher error rates on less frequent inflections, while controls do not. Finally, unusual patterns are found for DLI participants on regular versus irregular verbs: regular verbs are slower to be read by DLI participants. These results are compared to findings from a previous simple lexical decision study. They are interpreted as indicating that DLI word reading patterns are qualitatively different from those evidenced by controls.

In this paper we describe a non-fluent aphasic patient who presents a selective impairment in the inflectional morphology of verbs but not of nouns in a highly inflected language, Greek. Furthermore, the patient's impairment was observed in production, but not in comprehension. More specifically, the patient manifested a selective deficit in the production of past-tense forms that do not involve computation of the rule-based aspectual marker. The patient's deficit pattern indicates that morphological processes have to be considered in relation to grammatical class in models of lexical processing.

This study investigates the processing of polymorphemic words in a highly inflected language, Bulgarian. The roles of semantic transparency, aspect, and bound or free root status in the recognition of aspectual verb forms were probed in the visual modality in a simple lexical decision and a masked priming experiment at a short SOA. Results from the two experiments yielded effects of semantic transparency and morphological complexity, demonstrating that both factors influence the recognition of prefixed aspectual forms in Bulgarian and pointing toward different access procedures. In contrast, the status of the root did not influence recognition patterns, suggesting that free-standing and bound roots are equivalent lexical units of access and representation in Bulgarian.

This paper addresses the issues of frequency and morphological regularity in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in developmentally language-impaired (DLI) francophones. Two visual lexical decision experiments (one simple, one primed) probe response latencies and response accuracy in DLI participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are mainly sensitive to suffix frequency and show little or no priming effects from primes morphologically related to the target. Results also show that irregularly related primes do not facilitate recognition of the target by participants with DLI. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to “morphological families” in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency, and support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure. Results indicate that the organization of the mental lexicon of individuals with DLI differs significantly from that of controls.

In the present research, we investigated the processing of Italian mass and count nouns and of their semantic and morphosyntactic attributes in people with neurodegenerative disease. The performance of a group of 26 Italian participants with Alzheimer's disease was studied in a semantic judgment task and a syntactic judgment task. Results were analyzed by means of mixed-effect models, revealing an interaction between task and stimulus category: The probability for correct responses to mass stimuli was significantly lower than that for count stimuli, but only in the semantic task. These findings confirm the major semantic impairment in dementia and suggest that mass nouns have particular features that make them more prone to impairment than count nouns for a progressively degenerating brain.

The present study addresses the issue of morphological manifestations specific to non-fluent aphasia in Greek. The off-line performance of a Greek-speaking aphasic patient is investigated using Paradis'(1987) Bilingual Aphasia Test. His difficulties with inflectional morphology are further probed through a series of comprehension, production, repetition and reading tasks. Results obtained show a dissociation in the patient's processing of nouns and verbs related to language-specific morphological features of these grammatical categories. This study underscores the importance of taking the particularities of a given language into account when interpreting aphasic manifestations and sheds new light on the issue of syndrome variability.

The way spoken language is represented by orthographic structure is thought to influence the cognitive reading mechanism for a language, and therefore language breakdown patterns should reflect this. The present article focuses on two patients, both monolingual native Spanish speakers, who were able to read words but showed great difficulty in reading nonwords. This finding could be attributed to the fact that these patients were reading globally using a lexical route. This pattern of reading behavior is known as phonological dyslexia. It has been argued that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers since its orthography is highly regular. Our findings contradict this hypothesis and support the view that cognitive reading mechanisms are universal.

This study presents a cross-linguistic investigation of lexical access and subjects' sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of compounds in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Polish. The following questions were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a role during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and constituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent carries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a strong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spite of the presence of second constituent heads.

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to “morphological families” in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The most salient and discussed features of agrammatism are the omission and substitution of grammatical morphemes, whether bound or free, in speech production. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that language-specific features determine the pattern of omissions and substitutions found; morphological markers are almost never omitted if the resulting form is a non-word; substitutions are mis-selections from existing paradigms. In the present paper we investigate the ways in which agrammatism is manifested in Algerian Arabic, a Semitic language where simple (O-prefixed and O-suffixed) words are described as consisting of three morphemes: the discontinuous consonantal root, the discontinuous vocalic base and a CV template or skeleton (McCarthy 1975). Our findings are comparable to those previously reported, in that the three agrammatic subjects who participated in this study do omit and substitute free-standing and bound grammatical markers, and never produce non-words. More specifically, their perf...

This paper reports a cross-linguistic study of noun phrase production by agrammatic aphasic speakers of Swedish, French, German, Polish, and English. The subjects were given comparable tests of contrastive naming for the different languages. The study demonstrates problems in noun phrase production, especially in structurally complex noun phrases, indicating increasing problems caused by an increasing processing load. The study further demonstrates great difficulties in the production of double adjectives in noun phrases. Recurring patterns found among the eleven agrammatic patients were: word order deviation (especially noun first), singular for plural (or singular first), use of quantifiers, production of some complex NP structures, and substitutions of grammatical markers, leading to agreement errors in complex NP structures. The findings are discussed in relation to possible strategies such as fragmentation of the noun phrase and/or use of topic-comment structure, as well as attempts to produ...

The present study is a cross-linguistic investigation reporting on an on-line experimental task administered to 24 Greek-speaking and 10 Polish-speaking non-brain-damaged individuals. The questions under investigation were the following: What is the process of word recognition of complex words? What is the basic priming unit — root or word? What is the nature of mental representations? Is there an effect of morphological relatedness in the priming of complex words? and finally, what are the contents of the mental lexicon? A visual lexical decision task within a morphological priming paradigm was used, probing the subjects' word recognition of simple and of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs. The results obtained confirm the importance of morphemic relatedness in each of the two languages. They also point towards a significant language-specific effect with respect to the identification of the basic priming unit and the basic unit of representation. The present study challenges the claim for universality of certain linguistic and psycholinguistic proposals and has strong implications for the existing theories on the lexicon and mental representations.

The present study investigates the repetition, comprehension, and production abilities of three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics on stimuli that require attention to the inflectional markers of number, gender, and tense. Two sets of experiments were conducted within a Strong Lexicalist framework. The results suggest that morphological deficits can manifest themselves at distinct levels of grammar, the lexical and the postlexical. The internal morphological structure and idiosyncracies of lexical items were found to have an effect on aphasic performance. A proposal of a differentially organized lexical storage reflecting the particularities of the French verbal system is put forth. The storage hypothesis suggested for verbs is extended to other lexical items.

Two psycholinguistic experiments were carried out in Italian to test the role played by the feature that distinguishes mass nouns from count nouns, as well as by the feature that distinguishes singular nouns from plural nouns. The first experiment, a simple lexical decision task, revealed a sensitivity of the lexical access system to the processing of the features Mass and Plural as shown by longer reaction times. In particular, nouns in the plural yielded longer reaction times than in the singular except when the plural form was irregular. Furthermore, the feature Mass also affected processing, yielding longer reaction times. In the second experiment, a sentence priming task, both the Plural and the Mass effects did not surface when a grammatical sentence fragment was the prime. These data show a direct correlation between the linguistic ‘complexity’ of plural/mass nouns and processing time. They also suggest that this complexity does not affect normal fluent spoken language where words are embedded in a semantic and syntactic context.