The effect of motion content in action naming by Parkinson's disease patients

Introduction The verb-specific impairment present in patients with motion-related neurological diseases has been argued to support the hypothesis that the processing of words referring to motion depends on neural activity in regions involved in motor planning and execution. We presented a group of P...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Herrera, Elena, Rodríguez-Ferreiro, Javier, Cuetos Vega, Fernando
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de la UB
OAI Identifier:oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/162867
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2445/162867
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Malaltia de Parkinson
Trastorns de la parla
Escorça cerebral
Moviment
Parkinson's disease
Speech disorders
Cerebral cortex
Motion
Descripción
Sumario:Introduction The verb-specific impairment present in patients with motion-related neurological diseases has been argued to support the hypothesis that the processing of words referring to motion depends on neural activity in regions involved in motor planning and execution. We presented a group of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with an action-naming task in order to test whether the prevalence of motion-related semantic content in different verbs influences their accuracy. Methods Forty-nine PD patients and 19 healthy seniors participated in the study. All of PD participants underwent a neurological and neuropsychological assessment to rule out dementia. Subjective ratings of the motion content level of 100 verbs were obtained from 14 young voluntaries. Then, pictures corresponding to two subsets of 25 verbs with significantly different degrees of motor component were selected to be used in an action-naming task. Stimuli lists were matched on visual and psycholinguistic characteristics. Results ANOVA analysis reveals differences between groups. PD patients obtained poor results in response to pictures with high motor content compared to those with low motor association. Nevertheless, this effect did not appear on the control group. The general linear mixed model analytic approach was applied to explore the influence of the degree of motion-related semantic content of each verb in the accuracy scores of the participants. The performance of PD patients appeared to be negatively affected by the level of motion-related semantic content associated to each verb. Conclusions Our results provide compelling evidence of the relevance of brain areas related to planning and execution of movements in the retrieval of motion-related semantic content.