SEMANTIC FACTORS IN VERB RETRIEVAL - AN EFFECT OF COMPLEXITY

Aphasic patients often have more difficulty retrieving verbs than noun s. We present data from eight aphasics demonstrating that they have a selective impairment for verb retrieval. We then explore the role of s emantic complexity (i.e., the number of semantic features) in verb ret rieval using a delayed repetition/history completion task. The results indicate that six of the patients are better at retrieving semantical ly complex verbs (e.g., run) than semantically simpler verbs (e.g., go ). The results have implications for accounts of the noun/verb dissoci ation in aphasia, as well as for theories of verb representation, (C) 1998 Academic Press.