Abstract
A 60-year-old right-handed female developed non-fluent aphasia and right mild hemiparesis following a traumatic head injury. Magnetic resonance imaging showed multiple cerebral damages in left lateral cerebral cortex. The most striking aphasic feature was disorders of verb retrieval and particle choice in her spontaneous speech and verbal description tasks. On the serial tasks of confrontation naming, pointing by auditory stimulus, and oral use description for 10 usual manipulable objects, her verbal description for object use was selectively and severely impaired, whereas her abilities of oral naming and pointing were perfectly preserved. On the verbal description task for 100 line-drawing action pictures, she correctly produced only 29% of verbs and 44% of particles, in which her errors for verb retrieval were unassociated with those for particle choice. For six months, her verb retrieval and particle production improved. And whether or not she could retrieve the verbs, the correct particles in her description were similarly increased. These data suggest that abilities of verb retrieval and particle choice constitute separate neural structures, although multiple lesions in this patient preclude discussion of the clinico-anatomical correlation.
