 Finally, a few words on the distinction between the inferential and the referential component of lexical competence. As we have seen in  Section 3.2,  Marconi (1997) suggested that processing of lexical meaning might be distributed between two subsystems, an inferential and a referential one. Beginning with Warrington (1975), many patients had been described that were more or less severely impaired in referential tasks such as naming from vision (and other perceptual modalities as well), while their inferential competence was more or less intact. The complementary pattern (i.e., the preservation of referential abilities with loss of inferential competence) is definitely less common. Still, a number of cases have been reported, beginning with a stroke patient of Heilman et al. (1976), who, while unable to perform any task requiring inferential processing, performed well in referential naming tasks with visually presented objects (he could name 23 of 25 common objects). In subsequent years, further cases were described. For example, in a study of 61 patients with lesions affecting linguistic abilities, Kemmerer et al. (2012) found 14 cases in which referential abilities were better preserved than inferential abilities. More recently, Pandey &amp; Heilman (2014), while describing one more case of preserved (referential) naming from vision with severely impaired (inferential) naming from definition, hypothesized that “these two naming tasks may, at least in part, be mediated by two independent neuronal networks”. Thus, while double dissociation between inferential processes and naming from vision is well attested, it is not equally clear that it involves referential processes in general. On the other hand, evidence from neuroimaging is, so far, limited and overall inconclusive. Some neuroimaging studies (e.g., Tomaszewski-Farias et al. 2005, Marconi et al. 2013), as well as TMS mapping experiments (Hamberger et al. 2001, Hamberger &amp; Seidel 2009) did find different patterns of activation for inferential vs. referential performances. However, the results are not entirely consistent and are liable to different interpretations. For example, the selective activation of the anterior left temporal lobe in inferential performances may well reflect additional syntactic demands involved in definition naming, rather than be due to inferential processing as such (see Calzavarini 2017 for a discussion).