Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Objective: To examine how co-speech gestures depicting actions are a ected in Parkinson’s disease (PD), and to explore how gestures might be related to measures of verbal fluency and action naming. Background: PD a ects not only motor abilities, but also language and communication. Language is more impaired for words relating to motor content; e.g., patients take longer to name actions with a high compared to a low motor content. Co-speech gestures embody a form of action which is tightly linked to language and which represent meaningful information that forms a unified whole together with that contained in speech. However, co-speech gestures have rarely been investigated in PD. Recent data showed that gestural precision was reduced in PD patients when describing actions, suggesting that the mental representations of actions underlying their co-speech gestures have become less specific. We investigated this phenomenon for a wider range of actions than the original study, and also explored the possible relationship between verbal fluency/naming deficits and gestures. Method: Sixteen PD patients and 13 IQ-matched healthy controls were video recorded describing pictures and video clips of actions, such as running and knitting. Participants also completed measures of verbal fluency (generating as many words as possible in one minute for certain phonological and semantic categories) and action naming. Results: Analysis is in progress. We are comparing the rate of co-speech gesture production as well as the precision of action-related co-speech gestures between PD patients and controls. We will also examine the relationship between gestures and scores on tasks of verbal fluency and action naming. Conclusions: Investigating co-speech gestures associated with actions has implications for understanding both communication and action representation in Parkinson’s.