Evidence from neuropsychology on verb features: the case of a patient with semantic dementia

The aim of this study is to investigate whether Referential Semantics (RS) and Lexical Semantics (LS) are independently represented in the brain. We report the case of a Semantic Dementia patient who, despite a severe impairment in accessing verb RS, was perfectly able to access the verb lexical semantic features that govern specific morphosyntactic operations. This pattern of performance constitutes the first evidence that the distinction between RS and LS, that operates in language, does have a neuropsychological correlate.