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Article In: The Mental Lexicon: Online-First Articles

A comparison of the verbal vocabulary of Parkinson’s Disease patients and healthy speakers

Analyzing action-dominance via semantic vector analysis

ORCiD logo with link | Universität Leipzig
 | Universität Leipzig
 | Universität Bielefeld
 | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
 | University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein
 | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
 | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
In research on the motor grounding of action language, the study of language users suffering from an impairment of the motor system may provide important insights. One such group are Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients, who have been shown to exhibit effects of an impaired motor grounding. Evidence for this impairment has been obtained in a number of language-processing experiments. The present study extends this line of research by testing whether this impairment affects the semantic quality of the vocabulary of PD patients. We address this question by analyzing a corpus containing narratives of two fairy tales produced by German-speaking PD patients and a control group of healthy speakers. More specifically, we employ semantic vector analysis in two separate analyses to test the hypothesis of a reduced action-dominance in the verbal vocabulary of PD patients compared to healthy controls. The findings show a mixed pattern, with the results for one set of narratives aligning more robustly with the main hypothesis than the results for the other. We discuss the results against the background of previous findings and point out their implications for research on the motor grounding of action language and its representation in the mental lexicon.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Action language in PD patients — processing and representation
  • 3.Employing semantic vector analysis to investigate action-dominance
  • 4.Data and method
    • 4.1The dataset
    • 4.2Data extraction
    • 4.3Employing comparison lists to analyze action-dominance of the vocabulary
    • 4.4Measuring similarity to action and non-action vocabulary
    • 4.5Measuring separability from action and non-action vocabulary
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Similarity analysis
    • 5.2Separability analysis
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Synthesizing the results of the two vector-based analyses
    • 6.2The present study in the context of previous research
    • 6.3The role of medication
    • 6.4A psycholinguistic explanation
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Data availability statement
  • Ethics and consent
  • Acknowledgments
  • Competing interests
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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