Semantic similarity and grammatical class in naming actions

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form, the other half as verbs inflected for third person singular or plural. We found a reliable semantic interference effect. Crucially, we also observed a significant interaction between naming context and grammatical class: naming latencies were slower for verb distracters in the inflected form condition, but not in the citation form condition. The results are taken to provide evidence for the separability of semantics and grammatical class.

[1]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Noun and verb retrieval by normal subjects. Studies with PET. , 1996, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[2]  W. Levelt,et al.  Semantic distance effects on object and action naming , 2002, Cognition.

[3]  T. Pechmann,et al.  The activation of word class information during speech production. , 2002 .

[4]  M. Garrett,et al.  Representing the meanings of object and action words: The featural and unitary semantic space hypothesis , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  Wido La Heij,et al.  Semantic interference, orthographic facilitation, and their interaction in naming tasks. , 1995 .

[6]  Elizabeth K. Warrington,et al.  Category specificity in an agrammatic patient: The relative impairment of verb retrieval and comprehension , 1985, Neuropsychologia.

[7]  Ardi Roelofs,et al.  Testing a non-decompositional theory of lemma retrieval in speaking: Retrieval of verbs , 1993, Cognition.

[8]  D. Perani,et al.  The neural correlates of verb and noun processing. A PET study. , 1999, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[9]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain , 1991, Nature.

[10]  Eric Wanner,et al.  Language acquisition: the state of the art , 1982 .

[11]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  The representation of grammatical categories in the brain , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[12]  Wido La Heij,et al.  THE LOCUS OF ORTHOGRAPHIC-PHONOLOGICAL FACILITATION : REPLY TO ROELOFS, MEYER, AND LEVELT (1996) , 1996 .

[13]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  Patterns of dissociation in comprehension and production of nouns and verbs , 1988 .

[14]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Self-Organizing Maps , 2010 .

[15]  J Druks,et al.  An Object and Action Naming Battery , 2000 .

[16]  A. N. Haendiges,et al.  Verb Retrieval in Aphasia. 1. Characterizing Single Word Impairments , 1997, Brain and Language.

[17]  G. Vigliocco,et al.  A semantic analysis of grammatical class impairments: semantic representations of object nouns, action nouns and action verbs , 2002, Journal of Neurolinguistics.