d'Honincthun Peggy, Pillon Agnesa
Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Cortex. 2008 Jul-Aug;44(7):834-47. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2007.04.003. Epub 2007 Dec 23.
We report the case study of a patient JB with the frontal variant of frontotemporal dementia (fv-FTD), who was disproportionately impaired in naming and comprehending verbs in comparison with nouns. We examined to what extent the patient's verb disproportionate deficit was dependent on the type of stimuli used to assess verb processing, that is, static depictions of actions, videotaped actions, or verbal stimuli. We found that the verb disproportionate deficit JB presented when her naming or comprehension was assessed from static depictions of actions (i.e., photographs) disappeared when naming or comprehension was assessed from videotaped actions or verbal stimuli. These results indicated that JB did not present disproportionate difficulties with verb processing per se (i.e., with retrieving the lexical and semantic features of verbs). Instead, the seemingly disproportionate verb deficit found in JB -- and possibly also in other previously reported patients with executive resource limitation -- was likely due to the picture stimuli used to probe verb versus noun naming and comprehension not being equal in executive resource demands. The finding of this study thus underscores the need of considering carefully the specific effects of task and type of stimuli in the patients' performance with action pictures before making theoretical claims about the noun versus verb or object versus action lexical and semantic representation in the brain.
我们报告了一例患有额颞叶痴呆额叶变异型（fv-FTD）的患者JB的病例研究，该患者在动词命名和理解方面比名词受到的损害更大。我们研究了患者动词比例失调缺陷在多大程度上取决于用于评估动词加工的刺激类型，即动作的静态描绘、录像动作或言语刺激。我们发现，当从动作的静态描绘（即照片）评估JB的命名或理解时出现的动词比例失调缺陷，在从录像动作或言语刺激评估命名或理解时消失了。这些结果表明，JB本身在动词加工方面（即检索动词的词汇和语义特征方面）并没有出现比例失调的困难。相反，在JB身上发现的看似比例失调的动词缺陷——可能在其他先前报道的存在执行资源限制的患者中也存在——可能是由于用于探测动词与名词命名和理解的图片刺激在执行资源需求上不相等。因此，本研究的结果强调了在对大脑中名词与动词或物体与动作的词汇和语义表征做出理论断言之前，需要仔细考虑任务和刺激类型对患者使用动作图片表现的具体影响。
