• cognitive neurophychology
• noun/verb dissociation
• verbs deficit

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate language processing in aphasia. Aphasia is an acquired speech disorder which leads to impairment of different language modules. The cognitive neuropsychological and linguistic study of aphasia legitimates a deeper understanding of the correlation between semantics (i.e. conceptual knowledge of words) and morphosyntactic operations as well as grammatical classes distinctions (e.g. nouns vs. verbs).

This thesis takes the form of a single-patient case study as a method to examine aphasia; the first phase of the investigation involves the identification of an suitable patient (i.e. affected by primary progressive aphasia) and a control group (i.e. neurologically unimpaired subjects). The patient is assessed with several tests that inspect whether she is impaired at specific grammatical classes and if this occurs in a modality-specific manner. Successively, the patient is administered with further examinations that try to disentangle the processing of semantics and morphosyntax. By identifying grammatical classes as separable from conceptual semantic knowledge, we will eliminate the assumption that the two modules are not dissociable. This will allow for more consideration of aphasic patients and may contribute to future research on both linguistics and neuropsychological rehabilitation techniques.