The organisation of nouns and verbs in bilingual speakers: A case of bilingual grammatical category-specific deficit

We report the naming performance of an early and highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilingual woman (LPM) suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). LPM's performance in several naming tasks revealed a disproportionate deficit for nouns in comparison to verbs. Further analyses revealed that this dissociation does not seem to be caused by damage to her semantic system, but rather by damage at the lexical level. Interestingly, the patient's performance in her first and second language revealed comparable noun–verb dissociation both in terms of the magnitude of the effect and in terms of error types. These results suggest that the principles governing the organisation of lexical representations in the brain are similar for the two languages of a bilingual.