Beyond the Mental Lexicon: Evidence from Neuropsychology and Implications for the Morphosyntax/Semantics Interface

This study on a patient with semantic dementia aimed at investigating the neuropsychological correlates of the morphosyntax/semantics interface. Patient MC presented with severe but selective impairments in both semantics and morphosyntax. Her pattern of performance of morphosyntactic tasks that specifically required access to certain semantic features revealed a dissociation between the morphosyntactically relevant components of word meaning and the referential meaning of words. These results provide the first evidence of a cognitive and neural independence of the two components of word meaning.