Apathy and actions- another consideration when theorizing about embodied nature of language in Parkinson's disease.
Logan Wolff, Jared F Benge, Samia Ortiz-Hernandez and 4 others
PMID 34365120WHAT IT FOUND
In 20 people with Parkinson's, cueing improved action and animal fluency, suggesting retrieval problems rather than lost concepts.
Self-reported inability to initiate actions correlated with poor verb generation, but only with behavioral apathy, not mood or other apathy types.
Key findings
01Cueing significantly improved both action and animal fluency, with no significant difference in the degree of improvement between the two categories.
02Action fluency performance correlated with behavioral initiation apathy, and those with higher behavioral apathy benefited more from cueing.
03Participants with clinically impaired action or animal fluency showed much greater percentage improvement with cueing than those without impairments.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Very small sample size (n=20) limits generalizability. No control group (e.g., healthy or non-PD neurodegenerative) was included. Correlational design cannot establish causation. Multiple comparisons were not corrected for. Sample was non-diverse and recruited from a single center.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest. Funding was provided by the N.I.H. (Extramural) and Non-U.S. Gov't sources.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that cueing will improve all language deficits in Parkinson's disease. The benefit was specific to fluency tasks where retrieval was the bottleneck, and the study did not test other language domains like comprehension or grammar. Furthermore, the correlation with apathy was modest and exploratory.