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Dissociations between the processing of nouns and verbs are well recognised in a number of neurological diseases. Anatomically, deficits in verb processing have been linked to the anterior (frontal), those of noun processing to the posterior (temporal) cortical regions of the dominant hemisphere. It remains, however, unclear whether this difference is due to linguistic (verbs versus nouns) or conceptual (actions versus objects) properties. To address this issue, we designed a novel test (the kissing and dancing test, KDT) consisting of 52 triplets of pictures depicting actions and 52 word triplets consisting of verbs, which was directly comparable with the 52 triplets of objects and nouns of the pyramids and palmtrees test (PPT). The two tests were validated in conjunction first on a normal control group, followed by assessments of 10 patients with the frontal variant frontotemporal dementia (fvFTD) and 14 patients with …