On knowing the auxiliary of a verb that cannot be named: evidence for the independence of grammatical and phonological aspects of lexical knowledge.

We report the case of an Italian anomic subject who was invariably able to provide the auxiliary of verbs he failed to produce in oral naming tasks. This pattern of performance contrasts with that of another Italian-speaking patient documented by Miceli and Caramazza (1988) who showed a selective impairment in accessing syntactic features of words, but not their phonological forms. This double dissociation suggests that syntactic and phonological information in the lexicon are accessed independently and represented in distinct neural structures.