DISSOCIATION IN THE RETRIEVAL OF SYNTACTIC AND PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES OF VERBS IN AN ANEMIC SUBJECT

In current models of speech production lexical selection is characteri zed as a two-stage process: in the first stage, the lemma, a represent ation of the semantic and syntactic properties of the word is accessed ; in the second stage, the lexeme, a representation of the phonologica l properties of the word is accessed. The results of recent investigat ions of the performance of anemic subjects provide some of the stronge st evidence in support of the distinction between lemmas and lexemes. Henaff Gonon, Bruckert, and Michel (1989) and Badecker, Miozzo, and Za nuttini (1995) reported a French-speaking and an Italian-speaking subj ect, respectively, who successfully indicated the gender of the nouns they failed to produce. Both these investigations restricted their exa mination to grammatical gender, a syntactic features of nouns. The que stion is whether other syntactic properties in addition to gender are specified independently of the phonological properties of the word. An additional question concerns the organization of syntactic features a cross grammatical classes: are the syntactic features of for instance verbs or adjectives distinctly represented from their phonological for ms? The present study is aimed at exploring whether Dante can provide syntactic information of verbs when he fails to access their phonologi cal representations.