Downloaded By: [Psychology Research Library] At: 18:51 17 October 2007 Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and the animate/ inanimate effect Yanchao Bi State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Zaizhu Han and Hua Shu State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Alfonso Caramazza Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; University of Trento, Trento, Italy We report an aphasic patient, Z.B.L., who showed a significant advantage for verbs compared to nouns in picture-naming tests. Within the object class, he performed better on animate things than on non- living things in picture naming as well as in an “attribute judgement task”. This pattern of performance is contrary to the central prediction of a recent proposal (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), which attri- butes noun–verb dissociation in aphasic patients to deficits in processing certain kinds of semantic fea- tures. This model proposes that conceptual representations of verbs have a lower proportion of sensory features than do representations of nouns; the same is proposed for inanimate versus animate items within the noun category. Noun deficits are assumed to arise due to impairment for the processing of sensory features. The model predicts that if a patient is more impaired for nouns than for verbs, he will also display more difficulty with animate than with inanimate objects. Contrary to predications derived from this theory, Z.B.L. performed better with animate than inanimate nouns. Introduction Category-specific deficits in brain-damaged patients have played an important role in the devel- opment of cognitive theories about the lexical and the semantic systems. For instance, some brain- damaged patients are disproportionately impaired for words/objects in certain conceptual categories, such as living things, nonliving things, or body parts (see Capitani, Laiacona, Mahon, & Caramazza, 2003, for an extensive review). Such patterns of impairment have motivated and con- strained cognitive theories about the structure of the semantic system (e.g., Caramazza & Shelton, Correspondence should be addressed to Zaizhu Han, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, P.R. China (E-mail: zzhhan@bnu.edu.cn). The research reported here was supported in part by the Sackler Scholars Program in Psychobiology to YB, NIH Grant DC 04542 to AC, and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (7052035) to HS. We thank Jennifer Shelton for providing the “central attribute judgement” test, Xiaoli Bai for referring Z.B.L. to us and making possible the test administration, Gabriele Miceli for his help in reading MRI scans, and Kevin Shapiro for helpful discussions. We are most grateful to Z.B.L. for his partici- pation. This study has been presented at the annual meeting of Academy of Aphasia in Amsterdam, 2005; the proceedings of that conference presentation are to appear in a special issue of the journal Brain and Language. # 2007 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business 485 http://www.psypress.com/cogneuropsychology DOI:10.1080/02643290701502391 COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY, 2007, 24 (5), 485 – 504