Recent masked priming experiments have brought to light a morphological level of analysis that is exclusively based on the orthographic appearance of words, so that it breaks down corner into corn- and -er, as well as dealer into deal- and -er (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004).

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.