Abstract
Patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) have a motor disorder and cognitive difficulties, including difficulty with action verbs. However, the basis for the action verb impairment is unknown. Thirty-six participants with ALS and 22 with Parkinson’s disease (PD) were assessed on a simple, two-alternative forced-choice associativity judgment task, where performance was untimed and did not depend on motor functioning. We probed 120 frequency-matched action verbs, cognition verbs, concrete nouns and abstract nouns. Performance was related to T1 MRI imaging of gray matter atrophy. Patients with ALS were significantly impaired relative to healthy senior control participants only for action verbs. Patients with PD did not differ from controls for all word categories. Regression analyses related action verb performance in ALS to motor-associated cortices, but action verb judgments in PD were not related to cortical atrophy. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that action verb difficulty in ALS is related in part to the degradation of action-related conceptual knowledge represented in motor-associated cortex.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by NIH (AG032953, AG017586, NS044266, AG038490, NS053488, AG043503), the ALS Association, and the Wyncote Foundation.
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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
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York, C., Olm, C., Boller, A. et al. Action verb comprehension in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. J Neurol 261, 1073–1079 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-014-7314-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-014-7314-y