Grammatical processing of nouns and verbs in left frontal cortex

We report the case of a brain-damaged subject R.C. who is more impaired at producing grammatical forms of words and pseudo-words used as verbs (he judges, he wugs) than of the same words used as nouns (the judges, the wugs). This pattern of performance constitutes the first clear demonstration that grammatical knowledge about verbs can be selectively impaired following brain damage. A comparison of R.C.’s behavioral and neurological profile with that of a patient who shows similar difficulties with nouns suggests that nouns and verbs are processed by separate neural systems with components in the left frontal lobe