The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit

Patient WBN has a lexical-semantic deficit resulting in impaired performance on language comprehension tasks that require access to verb meanings in both single-word and sentence contexts. However, WBN shows no such comprehension impairment with respect to lexical syntax. Specifically, he performs without error on comprehension tasks that rely on knowledge of lexical-specific verb subcategory requirements. This performance pattern supports theories of lexical representation and processing in which lexical syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently from lexical semantic information.