All the articles reviewed and discussed in this paper observe related topics such as neuropsychological disorders of lexical processing, selective deficit caused by brain injure, cognitive neuropsychological research, etc. Some of the raised issues contradict each other, some serve as supports and additional prove for each other. In their theorizing, the authors refer to each other’s experience, arguing, discussing presented theories and performed researches. Articles are connected in a certain way, complementing one another and creating clear background for each subject being on the agenda.

“Lexical Organization of Nouns and Verbs in the Brain” by Alfonso Caramazza and Argye E. Hillis (Department of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University) performed a study the results of which raise two crucial questions concerning the nature and the locus of nouns and verbs organization in the lexical system. The questions are: “Is the noun-verb distinction represented in the semantic or in the phonological and orthographic lexicons?” and “Is grammatical-class knowledge represented independently of lexical forms or is it represented separately and redundantly within each modality-specific lexicon?”

The authors have performed the analysis of the neuropsychological disorders of lexical processing that presents important information about how different parts of a lexical system are arranged and work together, as well as about the internal composition of the processing components. Assumption is made that a neural organization of the semantic processing components are organized in categories such as objects, animals, fruits and vegetables, abstract versus concrete words, living objects versus inanimate ones, proper names etc., and is supported by the reports of patients with selective dysfunction of mentioned particular semantic categories. There is as well a suggestion that an aspect of lexical organization is the grammatical class of words, provided by the reports of selective dysfunction of the grammatical categories nouns and verbs.  Assuming that grammatical-class dissimilarities are not necessarily represented in phonological and orthographic output lexical components, the authors present the distinctly diverse performances of two brain-damaged individuals with modality-specific deficits confined principally (H.W.) or virtually (S.J.D.) to verbs in oral and written production.

The study was performed by asking patients to read aloud, to write a 296-word dictation and to name 6o pictures of objects and actions. Their performance of the set tasks was considered to help to document the double dissociation of disproportionate production of semantic faults in both oral and written communication. Basing their conclusions on the results of the experiments, the authors state that there is an exceptionally precise organization of lexical knowledge in the semantic and in the lexical form levels of the brain. They as well propose that even not having specific ideas about the nature of the mechanisms operating in brain and calculating lexical structure, it is obvious that computed information represents grammatical class of words as well as their phonological and orthographical form. The reported results are considered to turn out to be a significant challenge for the model of lexical processing that would no longer employ linguistic level information in the demonstration of lexical knowledge.

“Broken Brains and Normal Minds: Why Humpty-Dumpty Needs a Skeleton” by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Michael Van Kleeck examines usefulness of drawing conclusions about normal processing from selective deficit caused by brain injure, and proposes interpretation of how to make best use of the power this method is considered to have.

The article discusses the objectives and methods of functional-deficit approaches to explain the complex nature of mental activity. It characterizes certain number of empirical and logical complications of the process of formulating theories based only on examination of behavioral deficits caused by brain damage. The authors claim that the discussion is both critical and lacking constructiveness, thus needing description of approaches’ weaknesses to make argument for other approaches. The authors also discuss the proposal of how to apply deficit information in the most advantageous way to develop computational theories effectively.