Comparison of animal, action and phonemic fluency in aphasia

Faroqi‐Shah, Yasmeen; Milman, Lisa H.

doi:10.1111/1460-6984.12354

Cited by 22 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Moreover, it is well-established that verb, semantic, and phonemic fluency tasks draw on different cognitive entities and anatomical neuronal substrates (Henry et al, 2004;Östberg et al, 2007;Stokholm et al, 2013;Clark et al, 2014;Faroqi-Shah and Milman, 2018;Gordon et al, 2018). For instance, verb fluency is known to engage syntactic processing as many verbs necessitate activation of argument structures related to thematic roles (Pekkala, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Paek

Murray

Newman

2020

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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Currently there are ∼6 million Americans who are affected by dementia. Verbal fluency tasks have been commonly and frequently utilized to document the disease progression in many forms of dementia. Verb fluency has been found to display substantial potential to detect and monitor the cognitive declines of individuals with dementia who have fronto-striatal involvement. The neural substrates underlying verb fluency task performance, however, have remained unclear so far, especially in individuals with dementia. Therefore, in the current study, brain activation patterns of seven individuals with dementia and nine healthy older adults were investigated using functional MRI. The participants performed in the scanner an overt, subject-paced verb fluency task, representative of fluency tasks used in clinical settings. The brain activation patterns during the verb fluency task were compared between the two groups, and a correlational analysis was conducted to determine the neural correlates of verb fluency performance. The results suggest that compared to healthy older adults, individuals with dementia demonstrated poorer verb fluency performance and showed higher activation in specific neural regions, such as the bilateral frontal lobe. In addition, the correlational analysis revealed that poorer verb fluency performance lead to increased activation in certain cortical and subcortical areas, including left hippocampus and right supramarginal gyrus. The current findings are consistent with previous neurophysiological findings related to semantic (noun) fluency performance in older adults and individuals with dementia and add to the empirical evidence that supports the role of the frontal lobe and hippocampus in verb retrieval and search. Declines in verb fluency performance cannot only be used as a cognitive marker, but also represent neuropathological changes due to the neurodegenerative disease.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Paek

Murray

Newman

2020

Front. Aging Neurosci.

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“…An increased production of more highly frequent alternatives can be taken as an index of lexical simplification of language (Paetzold and Specia, 2017 ). A similar shift towards high-frequency words is commonly observed in language produced by individuals suffering from dementia (Thompson-Schill et al, 1999 ; Bird et al, 2000 ; Silveri et al, 2002 ; Sailor et al, 2004 ; Forbes-McKay et al, 2005 ) or in speech patterns of aphasic patients (Howard et al, 1984 ; Nickels and Howard, 1994 , 1995 ; Cuetos et al, 2002 ; Boukrina et al, 2015 ; Faroqi-Shah and Milman, 2018 ). In cases of thalamic aphasia, such substitution of words with semantically related and highly frequent alternatives has been linked with the development of semantic paraphasias and jargon (Crosson, 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lexical frequency effects may originate throughout this incremental process, beginning with the interface between the semantic (preverbal) and the lexical stage levels, with an emphasis, however, on phonological word form encoding (Jescheniak and Levelt, 1994 ; Navarrete et al, 2006 ; Kittredge et al, 2008 ; Knobel et al, 2008 ). In a clinical context, increased use of highly frequent words and difficulties in the production and recognition of infrequent words are found in aphasic conditions and dementia (Nickels and Howard, 1994 , 1995 ; Bird et al, 2000 ; Sailor et al, 2004 ; Schwartz et al, 2004 ; Vita et al, 2014 ; Boukrina et al, 2015 ; Kavé and Goral, 2016 ; Faroqi-Shah and Milman, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thalamic but Not Subthalamic Neuromodulation Simplifies Word Use in Spontaneous Language

Tiedt

Ehlen

Wyrobnik

et al. 2021

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Several investigations have shown language impairments following electrode implantation surgery for Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) in movement disorders. The impact of the actual stimulation, however, differs between DBS targets with further deterioration in formal language tests induced by thalamic DBS in contrast to subtle improvement observed in subthalamic DBS. Here, we studied speech samples from interviews with participants treated with DBS of the thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) for essential tremor (ET), or the subthalamic nucleus (STN) for Parkinson’s disease (PD), and healthy volunteers (each n = 13). We analyzed word frequency and the use of open and closed class words. Active DBS increased word frequency in case of VIM, but not STN stimulation. Further, relative to controls, both DBS groups produced fewer open class words. Whereas VIM DBS further decreased the proportion of open class words, it was increased by STN DBS. Thus, VIM DBS favors the use of relatively common words in spontaneous language, compatible with the idea of lexical simplification under thalamic stimulation. The absence or even partial reversal of these effects in patients receiving STN DBS is of interest with respect to biolinguistic concepts suggesting dichotomous thalamic vs. basal ganglia roles in language processing.

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“…We strive to address these unresolved issues (discussed below) and seek to fill the gaps to determine the relative contribution of lexical and executive control processes during verbal fluency performance in aphasia. The above‐mentioned studies in aphasia, with the exception of Faroqi‐Shah and Milman (2018), have mostly investigated semantic fluency, whereas letter fluency remains underexplored in monolingual aphasia population. Our understanding of verbal fluency in monolingual aphasia will benefit from a systematic comparison of semantic and letter fluency.…”

Section: The Current Investigation Research Questions and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal fluency difficulties in aphasia: A combination of lexical and executive control deficits

Bose

Patra

Antoniou

et al. 2022

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: Verbal fluency tasks are routinely used in clinical assessment and research studies of aphasia. People with aphasia produce fewer items in verbal fluency tasks. It remains unclear if their output is limited solely by their lexical difficulties and/or has a basis in their executive control abilities. Recent research has illustrated that detailed characterization of verbal fluency performance using temporal characteristics of words retrieved, clustering and switching, and pause durations, along with separate measures of executive control stands to inform our understanding of the lexical and cognitive underpinnings of verbal fluency in aphasia.Aims: To determine the locus of the verbal fluency difficulties in aphasia, we compared semantic and letter fluency trials between people with aphasia and healthy control participants using a wide range of variables to capture the performance between the two groups. The groups were also tested on separate measures of executive control to determine the relationship amongst these tasks and fluency performance.Methods & Procedures: Semantic (animal) and letter (F, A, S) fluency data for 60s trials were collected from 14 people with aphasia (PWA) and 24 healthy adult controls (HC). Variables, such as number of correct responses, clustering and switching analyses, were performed along with temporal measures of the retrieved words (response latencies) and pause durations. Participants performed executive control tasks to measure inhibitory control, mental-set shifting and memory span.Outcomes & Results: Compared with HC, PWA produced fewer correct responses, showed greater difficulty with the letter fluency condition, were slower in getting started with the trials, showed slower retrieval times as noted in within-and between-cluster pause durations, and switched less often. Despite these retrieval difficulties, PWA showed a similar decline in the rate of recall to This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Comparison of animal, action and phonemic fluency in aphasia

Abstract: Verbal fluency, particularly animal fluency, is sensitive to even mild aphasia. PWA produced lexically simpler responses than their neurotypical peers. This study identifies the relevance of qualitative analysis of verbal fluency responses.

Cited by 22 publications

References 63 publications

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Neural Correlates of Verb Fluency Performance in Cognitively Healthy Older Adults and Individuals With Dementia: A Pilot fMRI Study

Thalamic but Not Subthalamic Neuromodulation Simplifies Word Use in Spontaneous Language

Verbal fluency difficulties in aphasia: A combination of lexical and executive control deficits

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