LEXICAL-SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF ACTIONS/VERBS IN PARKINSON’S DISEASE
Background: Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease present motor and cognitive impairment. In the language domain PD is a good model to study the functional contribution of the motor system to language processing. Objective: To investigate the performance of Parkinson’s disease patients on a lexical-semantic processing task of action verbs, compared to cognitively healthy controls. Methods: Parkinson’s patients performed the naming (n=25) and semantic association (n=19) tests of the Kisssing and Dancing Test - KDT, adapted by Baradel (2016). Patients were compared to cognitively healthy controls (n=44). Results: We observed a difference in performance on the naming (t[47]=-2.609, p=0.012) and semantic verb association (t[36]=-4.795, p=0.000) tasks between the groups. Parkinson’s patients had lower mean scores than healthy controls on both the naming and semantic association tasks. Conclusion: Parkinson’s patients may exhibit difficulties in lexical and semantic access of language with action content compared to healthy subjects. These results are consistent with Embodied Cognition and may support therapeutic alternatives in the field of language neuroscience.