There is a significant body of psycholinguistic evidence that supports the hypothesis of an access to constituent representation during the mental processing of compound words. However it is not clear whether the internal hierarchy of the constituents (i.e., headedness) plays a role in their mental lexical processing and it is not possible to disentangle the effect of headedness from that of constituent position in languages that admit only head-final compounds, like English or Dutch.

Current data on the neural correlates of noun and verb processing are inconsistent as studies using different imaging techniques and/or different tasks have provided remarkably different results.

This paper reports the results of several studies on the mechanisms underlying Verb-Noun (V-N) dissociation. The objectives of the studies were to ascertain the location of the lesions causing predominant V or N impairment and to shed light on the different mental representations of these word classes through analyses of the data from neuropsychological patients.

Aphasic patients occasionally manifest a dissociated naming ability between objects and actions: this phenomenon has been interpreted as evidence of a separate organization for nouns and verbs in the mental lexicon. Nevertheless Bird et al. [Bird, H., Howard, D., Franklin, S. (2000). Why is a verb like an inanimate object? Grammatical category and semantic category deficits.