Acquisition and loss of nouns and verbs: parallel or divergent patterns? Ria De Bleser a, * , Christina Kauschke b a Department of Cognitive Neurolinguistics, Potsdam University, Postfach 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany b Free University Berlin, Germany Abstract This paper investigates a possible correspondence between the acquisition and breakdown of the ability to name nouns, verbs and their subcategories. The postulation of a universal developmental sequence, according to which children are predisposed to acquire nouns before verbs, has been challenged by cross-linguistic studies. In the case of acquired language loss in adults, the traditional assumption of a double dissociation between nouns and verbs has also been contested in recent work. Furthermore, subcategories of verbs (e.g. transitives versus intransitives) have been shown to be differentially acquired and affected. In our study, we elicited data on noun and verb processing in language production (picture naming task) from children acquiring German and from German aphasic adults. We will report the results from 240 German children (between 2; 6 and 8 years old) as well as the pattern of loss in 11 German aphasic adults. The results show similar category-specific effects in both populations, with a clear- cut noun advantage and a tendency to prefer intransitive verbs, thus supporting the assumption of a specific parallelism in the patterns of acquisition and loss. q 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Nouns; Verbs; Subcategories; Naming; Acquisition; Aphasia 1. Introduction Nouns and verbs have been a topic of linguistic research from the very beginning and form part of all classification systems of word categories that have been proposed. Modern linguistic research on parts of speech tends to fluctuate between the attribution of a universal status to word classes and the opposite view that each specific language has a specific word class system. The language-specific view has often been propagated by descriptive grammarians who noted the absence of adjectives and even noun–verb 0911-6044/03/$ - see front matter q 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S0911-6044(02)00015-5 Journal of Neurolinguistics 16 (2003) 213–229 www.elsevier.com/locate/jneuroling * Corresponding author. E-mail address: debleser@ling.uni-potsdam.de (R. De Bleser).