Facultad de Psicología, University of Oviedo, Spain.
Cortex. 2012 Jul;48(7):900-4. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.12.007. Epub 2010 Dec 23.
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.
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.
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.
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.
运动相关神经疾病患者存在动词特异性损伤，这一现象支持了这样一种假设，即与运动相关的词汇处理依赖于参与运动规划和执行的神经活动。我们向一组帕金森病（PD）患者呈现了一个动作命名任务，以检验不同动词中与运动相关的语义内容的普遍性是否会影响他们的准确性。
49 名 PD 患者和 19 名健康老年人参与了研究。所有 PD 参与者均接受了神经和神经心理学评估，以排除痴呆症。从 14 名年轻志愿者那里获得了 100 个动词的运动内容水平的主观评分。然后，选择了两个具有显著不同运动成分的 25 个动词子集的图片来用于动作命名任务。刺激列表在视觉和心理语言学特征上相匹配。
方差分析揭示了组间的差异。PD 患者对高运动内容图片的反应明显差于对低运动关联图片的反应。然而，对照组没有出现这种效果。一般线性混合模型分析方法被用于探索每个动词的与运动相关的语义内容的程度对参与者准确性得分的影响。PD 患者的表现似乎受到与每个动词相关的运动相关语义内容水平的负面影响。
我们的结果提供了令人信服的证据，表明与运动规划和执行相关的大脑区域在检索与运动相关的语义内容方面具有重要作用。
