Five fluent and five nonfluent aphasic and five non-brain-damaged adults' knowledge of goal-derived action categories were examined using an exemplar generation task. The nonfluent aphasic group produced significantly fewer total and accurate responses than both the fluent aphasic and non-brain-damaged groups. There were no significant differences between the fluent aphasic and non-brain-damaged groups relative to total responses or accuracy. These results are compatible with previous research suggesting that verb retrieval is relatively more disrupted in nonfluent than fluent aphasia. However, typicality analyses of responses revealed no significant differences among the three groups. This suggests that the difficulties in verb retrieval experienced by nonfluent aphasic adults can exist in the presence of relatively normal, within category lexical-semantic organization, at least for goal-directed action categories. The results are discussed relative to the construction of goal-derived categories and the nature of verbs.
