The role of noun syntax in spoken word production: evidence from aphasia

We describe MH who presents with agrammatic aphasia and anomia, and who produces semantic errors in the absence of a central semantic impairment. This pattern of performance implies damage to syntactic processes operating between semantics and phonological output. Damage here may lead to lexical selection errors and a deficit in combining words to form phrases. We investigated MH's knowledge and processing of noun syntax in mass and count nouns. She produced more count nouns than mass nouns. She showed impaired knowledge of noun syntax in judgement tasks and production tasks, with mass noun syntax being more impaired than count. We interpret these results in terms of a two-stage model of lexical retrieval. We propose that syntactic information represented at the lemma level is activated even in bare noun production, and can be differentially impaired across noun categories. That same damage can lead to semantic errors in production. For MH limited syntactic options are available to support production, and these favour count noun production. The data provide a new account of output semantic errors.