Bachoud-Lévi, A.-C., Dupoux, E., & Degos, J.-D.(2001).
Syntactic and Semantic organization in word form retrieval? Cortex, 37, 693-696.


Many studies have reported that naming disorders may affect selectively
certain semantic categories (animals vs. vegetables or artifacts, see Caramazza
and Shelton, 1998, for a review) or syntactic categories (open vs. closed class
items, Friederici and Schoenle, 1980, nouns vs. verbs, Baxter and Warrington,
1985; Caramazza and Hillis, 1991; Daniele et al., 1994; McCarthy and
Warrington, 1985; Miceli et al., 1988) suggesting that the conceptual system and
the output lexicon are organized along both syntactic and semantic dimensions.
Most current models of speech production distinguish two components in the
output lexicon: lexical selection and word form retrieval. Lexical selection
consists in comparing the conceptual representation of the object to be named to
the lexical entries, and selecting the best match. Conceivably, this level should
be both sensitive to syntactic and semantic parameters. Word form retrieval
involves recovering the phonological information associated to the selected entry
which is then used to construct a phonological plan to be executed by the
articulatory system. Prima facie, word form retrieval should not be influenced by
syntactic, and even more, semantic variables.
However, Cohen et al. (1997) reported the case of a patient impaired in word
form retrieval, as evidenced by a predominance of phonological paraphasias in
naming and reading tasks, which totally spared names for numbers. The authors
speculated that the topographical segregation of numbers in the conceptual
system propagates along the speech production pathway, even down to word
form retrieval. In this paper, we report the case of another aphasic patient who
shows a word form retrieval impairment in production which surprisingly spares
certain syntactic and semantic categories.