Naming abilities: Differentiation between objects and verbs in aphasia

Abstract Cognitive Neuropsychology aims to understand the processing mechanisms of normal and injured brain, by means of functional architectural models of information processing. Naming is one of the most important abilities in linguistic processing. Naming of different semantic and grammatical categories differ in their lexical properties and have distinct neuroanatomical substrates. We reviewed literature data on the differences between nouns and verbs in aphasic subjects reported by scientific publications in the form of indexed articles. Studies on naming abilities tended to emphasize the differentiation between nouns and verbs both in their lexical properties and neuroanatomical substrates. Functional neuroimaging studies have improved the state of knowledge regarding category-specific naming abilities, but further studies on different types of aphasia and the use of naming abilities in different contexts are warranted.