 Beginning in the mid-1970s, neuropsychological research on cognitive deficits related to brain lesions has produced a considerable amount of findings related to the neural correlates of lexical semantic information and processing. More recently, the development of neuroimaging techniques such as PET, fMRI and ERP has provided further means to adjudicate hypotheses about lexical semantic processes in the brain (Vigneau et al. 2006). Here we do not intend to provide a complete overview of such results (for a survey, see Faust 2012). We shall just mention three topics of neurolinguistic research that appear to bear on issues in the study of word meaning: the partition of the lexicon into categories, the representation of common nouns vs. proper names, and the distinction between the inferential and the referential aspects of lexical competence.