How does Parkinson’s Disease affect the way people use gestures to communicate about actions?
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.
Publication type
PosterPublication date
2012
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