Action and object naming in Parkinson's disease without dementia

Abstract

The present study aimed to assess the ability in objects and actions naming in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Further, we wished to assess the effect of a particular conceptual dimension, i.e. manipulability, on the naming of object and actions. Patients were recruited from the Department of Neurology, University of Brescia. Thirty-two were diagnosed as PD, according to published criteria, and 15 healthy volunteers matched in age and education to patients' sample. All patients underwent a detailed clinical and neurological evaluation. The stimuli used in the action-object picture naming task were taken from the Center for Research in Language-International Picture Naming Project corpus. To assess the effect of manipulability (or the involvement of fine hand movements) the noun-verb stimuli were re-categorized into manipulable and non-manipulable items (i.e. objects which can or cannot be manipulated and actions which do or do not involve fine hand movements). Patients showed a deficit both in action and object naming, compared with controls. In addition, patients with PD but not controls were significantly more impaired in action than in object naming. The current study supports the view that action naming is affected in patients with PD, possibly reflecting the presence of prefrontal dysfunction.

Words in motion: Motor-language coupling in Parkinson’s disease

“…naming [27,28], verbal fluency [29], related-word production [30]). Other reports have found that PD patients exhibiting difficulties in both actionverb and noun processing were more impaired in the former during word naming [31] and word generation [32], and that they improved action naming more than object naming upon stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus [33].…”

Syntax, action verbs, action semantics, and object semantics in Parkinson's disease: Dissociability, progression, and executive influences

“…Note, at this juncture, that virtually all studies on language processing in PD have been conducted with non-demented patients (Bertella et al, 2002;Boulenger et al, 2008;Cotelli et al, 2007;Grossman, Carvell, Stern, Gollomp, & Hurtig, 1992;Grossman et al, 2003;Herrera & Cuetos, 2012;Lieberman, Friedman, & Feldman, 1990;Lieberman et al, 1992). However, recent clinical research demonstrates that PD patients can manifest cognitive impairment even without reaching levels of dementia.…”

“…We assessed linguistic (syntactic processing, action-verb production) and semantic (actionaction and object-object association) skills using tasks which have proven sensitive to subtle impairments in neurodegenerative motor disorders, including PD (Cardona et al, 2013;Colman, Koerts, Stowe, Leenders, & Bastiaanse, 2011;Cotelli et al, 2007;Ibáñez et al, 2013;Lieberman et al, 1990), Huntington's disease (Kargieman et al, 2014;Saldert, Fors, Stroberg, & Hartelius, 2010), and motor neuron disease (Bak & Hodges, 2004;Cobble, 1998). All tasks were administered in Spanish, the participants' mother tongue.…”

Language Processing in Parkinson's Disease Patients Without Dementia

“…PD patients thus have difficulties retrieving the phonological form that is the label of an exemplar (Levelt et al, 1991). In addition, in PD, action naming is often found to be more impaired than object naming (Bertella et al, 2002;Cotelli et al, 2007), a phenomenon also observed in agrammatic/Broca's aphasic patients. Related to this, Signorini and Volpato (2006) found that PD patients were impaired on an action fluency task but not on semantic and phonemic fluency tasks.…”