THE MODALITY-SPECIFIC ORGANIZATION OF GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES - EVIDENCE FROM IMPAIRED SPOKEN AND WRITTEN SENTENCE PRODUCTION

We describe the case of a brain-damaged individual whose speech is cha racterized by difficulty with practically all words except for element s of the closed class vocabulary. In contrast, his written sentence pr oduction exhibits a complementary impairment involving the omission of closed class vocabulary items and the relative sparing of nouns. On t he basis of these differences we argue: (1) that grammatical categorie s constitute an organizing parameter of representation and/or processi ng for each of the independent, modality-specific lexicons, and (2) th at these observations contribute to the growing evidence that access t o the orthographic and phonological forms of words can occur independe ntly. (C) 1997 Academic Press