The crucial role of the event structure in the retrieval of nominalizations in aphasia

In the aphasic production, the verb-noun (V-N) dissociation (a condition whereby brain damage selectively affects one of the two categories, while sparing the other) may have a different nature in different cases, reflecting semantic, syntactic or grammatical class effects. The observation that the V-N dissociations have a different nature goes in hand with the fact that in Linguistics it is hard to spot out the differences between nouns and verbs in a clear-cut way. In this regard, the nominalization phenomenon is explicative since nominalizations share both nominal and verbal properties. In the literature on aphasia, only few have studies tested how verbal and nominal selective deficits impact on closely related pairs involving verbs and the corresponding nominalizations. The present study aims at verifying whether the aphasic production of nominalizations can be affected by class selective impairments or by semantic/syntactic deficits. It will be showed that the aphasic speakers’ errors enlighten the crucial role played by the event structure, the Aktionsart and the grammatical aspect in the retrieval of the nominalizations. Such conclusions provide neurolinguistic evidence in favour of the idea that some features and properties can cross the boundaries of the verb-noun class distinction.