How language flows when movements don’t: An automated analysis of spontaneous discourse in Parkinson’s disease
Introduction
Affecting more than 1% of individuals above age 60, Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease worldwide (de Rijk et al., 2000, Samii et al., 2004). It is characterized by progressive basal ganglia degeneration and dopamine depletion, which disrupts corticostriatal circuits involved in motor function and multiple high-level cognitive domains (Fearnley and Lees, 1991, Mattay et al., 2002, McKinlay et al., 2010, Muslimovic et al., 2005, Rodriguez-Oroz et al., 2009). Thus, the impact of PD goes well beyond the presence of movement disorders (Mattay et al., 2002, Svenningsson et al., 2012).
This is particularly evident in linguistic performance. Indeed, articulatory disorders in PD (Goberman and Blomgren, 2003, Goberman et al., 2010) are often accompanied by impairments in grammar (Bocanegra et al., 2015, Hochstadt et al., 2006, Lieberman et al., 1992), pragmatics (Holtgraves and McNamara, 2010, Monetta and Pell, 2007), verbal fluency (Raskin, Sliwinski, & Borod, 1992), and action-verb semantics (García and Ibáñez, 2014a, Bak, 2013, Bocanegra et al., 2015, Cardona et al., 2013). While these findings are quite revealing about the physiopathology of PD, it is hard to assess their impact in real life, since they stem from highly artificial tasks in which disconnected stimuli are processed in random or arbitrary succession. Also, the active demands of such often exhausting tasks render them limited as tools for prospective diagnosis criteria.
Our aim was to address both issues using automated tools. Specifically, we examined whether PD patients exhibit distinguishing discourse-level features as they produce naturally unfolding texts. This process, termed logogenesis, is based on the accumulation of interrelated lexico-grammatical selections which create distributed patterns above the word and sentence levels (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Insights into this dynamic process could afford a more ecological understanding of how this disease impacts verbal communication.
Section snippets
Background and hypotheses
Discourse production involves construing supra-sentential textual relations and deploying diverse communicative strategies (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Emergent distributed patterns can be detected by considering semantic fields, lexicogrammatical choices, and relations between adjacent or neighboring words (Bedi et al., 2014, Bedi et al., 2015, Mota et al., 2014, Mota et al., 2012). Analyses of these and other text-level variables have revealed population-specific patterns in various
Participants
The study included 51 non-demented PD patients (25 female) and 50 healthy controls (25 female) from the PC-GITA database (Orozco-Arroyave, Arias-Londoño, Vargas-Bonilla, González-Rátiva, & Nöth, 2014). All participants were monolingual Spanish speakers from Colombia. The patients had a mean age of 61.45 (SD = 9.77), with 10.71 (SD = 4.2) years of education. Mean values for these variables in the control sample were 60.9 (SD = 9.47) and 10.98 (SD = 4.54), respectively. Both groups were matched for age [t
Quantitative output
The monologues of each group were compared for basic linguistic attributes, namely, total word count, and number of content words, nouns, verbs, action verbs, non-action verbs, and type/token ratio, indicating that quantitative output was similar for both groups (Table 2).
Semantic fields
LSA measures revealed significant between-group differences in the second [Wilcoxon: Z = 2.12, p = 0.03; t-test: t (99) = 2.7, p = 0.008] and third [Wilcoxon: Z = 1.94, p = 0.05; t-test: t (99) = 2.5, p = 0.01] semantic components. As shown
Discourse patterns at the semantic level
Despite moderate predictive success, analysis of semantic fields robustly discriminated between groups. Action-related domains figured less strongly in patients than controls, whereas non-action concepts showed the opposite pattern. Greater impairments in action- than non-action language have been repeatedly observed in PD through controlled, atomistic tasks, including picture naming (Rodriguez-Ferreiro, Menendez, Ribacoba, & Cuetos, 2009), related-word production (Peran et al., 2003), and
Conclusion
The study of discourse phenomena in spontaneous speech offers an ecological window into language mechanisms. Here, using automatized tools, we found evidence for distinctive patterns in PD patients, as manifested in semantic fields, grammatical features, and word-level repetitions. Thus, the basal ganglia seem crucial for the deployment of multidimensional textual relationships in naturalistic discourse production. These insights could hardly have been reached via decontextualized atomistic
Conflict of interest
None to declare.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by grants from CONICET, UBA, CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1130920), COLCIENCIAS 1115-569-33858, COLCIENCIAS 1115-545-31374 (contract: 392), FONCyT-PICT 2012-0412, FONCyT-PICT 2012-1309, FONCyT-PICT 2013-1794, FONDAP 15150012, and the INECO Foundation. The authors would like to thank Fundalianza Parkinson Colombia for its generous help in the data collection process. DFS is sponsored by the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship 2014.
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