Abstract Details

Title Motion Verb Comprehension in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Parkinson's Disease

Topic Anterior Horn

Presentation(s) P07 - (-)

Poster/Presentation
Number 069

Objective

Background BACKGROUND: ALS patients are significantly more impaired with words involving actions than objects, and this impairment pattern correlates with motor association cortex atrophy (Grossman et al, 2008). Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients also may have significant difficulty naming actions compared to objects (Rodriguez-Ferreiro et al, 2009) and poorer ability naming pictures with high motor content than low motor content (Herrera et al, 2012), although others relate this to their limited executive resources (Grossman et al, 1994).

Design/Methods DESIGN/METHODS: ALS patients (n=23), PD patients (n=20) and elderly controls (ELD, n=13) completed a computerized two-alternative forced-choice lexical comprehension task. The task included 60 noun triads (30 concrete and 30 abstract) and 60 verb triads (30 cognitive and 30 motion). Stimuli were matched for imagability, familiarity, age of acquisition, and frequency.

Results RESULTS: ALS patients perform significantly worse than ELD on motion verbs (t=-2.08, p<.05), but do not differ from ELD on concrete or abstract nouns or cognitive verbs. PD patients do not differ from ELD for any category.

Conclusions CONCLUSIONS: The selective deficit of ALS patients for motion verbs is consistent with the idea that action features of words are degraded in ALS due to motor association cortex disease. The absence of a verb deficit in PD suggests that representations of action knowledge are preserved in these patients, and is more consistent with prior work suggesting that language deficits in PD are due to executive resource limitations.

Authors/Disclosures
Collin H. York PRESENTER	No disclosure on file
Emily Camp (University of Pennsylvania)	No disclosure on file
Danielle Weinberg	No disclosure on file
Murray Grossman, MD, FAAN (University of Pennsylvania)	Dr. Grossman has received personal compensation in the range of $5,000-$9,999 for serving as an Editor, Associate Editor, or Editorial Advisory Board Member for Neurology. The institution of Dr. Grossman has received research support from NIH.
	No disclosure on file
Emmanuelle Waubant, MD, PhD, FAAN (USCF MS Center)	The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from NIH. The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from NMSS. The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from PCORI. The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from Race to Erase MS. The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from Roche. The institution of Dr. Waubant has received research support from Department of Defense. Dr. Waubant has received publishing royalties from a publication relating to health care.

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