Grammatical class and context effects in a case of pure anomia: Implications for models of language production

Abstract

Numerous variables have been used in previous attempts to account for the performance of aphasic patients on naming tasks. These include lexical/semantic factors such as frequency, and contextual factors such as whether the target is produced as a single word or in a sentence. This paper reports the case of a pure anomic patient (HY) who was strongly affected by both lexical and contextual factors in his naming. Beyond a strong frequency effect, a marked grammatical class difference was noted. Verb production was far superior to noun production in single word naming. Production of nouns was highly facilitated by provision of a semantically relevant sentence frame. These two findings were related to current models of single word and sentence production; a functional locus for HY's naming deficit is proposed.