Impaired language in Alzheimer's disease: A comparison between English and Persian implicates content-word frequency rather than the noun-verb distinction.
Impaired language in Alzheimer's disease: A comparison between English and Persian implicates content-word frequency rather than the noun-verb distinction.
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阿尔茨海默氏病的语言障碍：英语和波斯语之间的比较表明内容-词频而不是名词-动词的区别。
DOI：
10.1101/2024.04.09.24305534
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发表时间：
2024
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Rezaii,Neg
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Sanati,Mahya;Bayat,Sabereh;Panahi,MehrdadMohammad;Khodadadi,Amirhossein;Rezaee,Sahar;Ghasimi,Mahdieh;Besharat,Sara;Fooladi,ZahraMahboubi;Dooghaee,MostafaAlmasi;Taheri,MortezaSanei;Dickerson,BradfordC;Goldberg,Adele;Rezaii,Neg
这项研究挑战了传统的心理语言学观点，即名词和动词之间的区别是理解神经障碍中语言障碍的关键。传统观点认为，额叶脑损伤与动词处理缺陷有关，后颞顶损伤与名词处理困难有关。然而，这一观点受到阿尔茨海默病（pwAD）患者的研究结果的质疑，这些患者尽管患有典型的颞顶叶萎缩，但仍表现出两类词汇的损伤。值得注意的是，与健康的人相比，残疾人倾向于在讲话中使用语义较轻的动词。通过研究说英语的老年痴呆症患者，并将他们与说波斯语的老年痴呆症患者进行比较，本研究旨在证明老年痴呆症患者的语言障碍源于语言中单词的分布特性，而不是名词和动词的不同神经处理网络。我们认为AD语言产生的主要缺陷是对高频词的过度依赖。英语中有一组频率特别高的动词，其使用频率超过大多数名词。由于pwAD倾向于使用高频词汇，这种词汇分布在英语中的副产品就是过度使用高频动词。相比之下，波斯语的特点是动词复杂，总体分布缺乏像英语中那样的高频动词。因此，我们假设说波斯语的pwAD不会对过度使用高频动词有偏见。我们分析了95名说英语的pwAD和91名健康对照，以及27名说波斯语的pwAD和27名健康对照的语言样本。采用统一的自动自然语言处理方法，我们测量了两个队列中名词、动词和单词频率的使用率。我们的研究结果表明，说英语的pwAD比健康人使用频率更高的动词，这一模式在说波斯语的pwAD中没有反映出来。至关重要的是，我们发现英语和波斯语使用者在有无AD时使用的动词频率之间存在显著的相互作用。此外，将名词和动词频率作为单独预测因素的回归模型在对AD进行分类时并不优于仅考虑整体词频的模型。综上所述，本研究表明，英语残疾人的语言异常反映了英语中单词的独特分布特性，而不是普遍存在的名动类差异。除了对阿尔茨海默病中的语言异常提供新的理解之外，该研究还强调了进一步研究不同语言的迫切需要，以加深我们对神经系统疾病中语言障碍机制的了解。
This study challenges the conventional psycholinguistic view that the distinction between nouns and verbs is pivotal in understanding language impairments in neurological disorders. Traditional views link frontal brain region damage with verb processing deficits and posterior temporoparietal damage with noun difficulties. However, this perspective is contested by findings from patients with Alzheimer’s disease (pwAD), who show impairments in both word classes despite their typical temporoparietal atrophy. Notably, pwAD tend to use semantically lighter verbs in their speech than healthy individuals. By examining English-speaking pwAD and comparing them with Persian-speaking pwAD, this research aims to demonstrate that language impairments in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) stem from the distributional properties of words within a language rather than distinct neural processing networks for nouns and verbs. We propose that the primary deficit in AD language production is an overreliance on high-frequency words. English has a set of particularly high-frequency verbs that surpass most nouns in usage frequency. Since pwAD tend to use high-frequency words, the byproduct of this word distribution in the English language would be an over-usage of high-frequency verbs. In contrast, Persian features complex verbs with an overall distribution lacking extremely high-frequency verbs like those found in English. As a result, we hypothesize that Persian-speaking pwAD would not have a bias toward the overuse of high-frequency verbs. We analyzed language samples from 95 English-speaking pwAD and 91 healthy controls, along with 27 Persian-speaking pwAD and 27 healthy controls. Employing uniform automated natural language processing methods, we measured the usage rates of nouns, verbs, and word frequencies across both cohorts. Our findings showed that English-speaking pwAD use higher-frequency verbs than healthy individuals, a pattern not mirrored by Persian-speaking pwAD. Crucially, we found a significant interaction between the frequencies of verbs used by English and Persian speakers with and without AD. Moreover, regression models that treated noun and verb frequencies as separate predictors did not outperform models that considered overall word frequency alone in classifying AD. In conclusion, this study suggests that language abnormalities among English-speaking pwAD reflect the unique distributional properties of words in English rather than a universal noun-verb class distinction. Beyond offering a new understanding of language abnormalities in AD, the study highlights the critical need for further investigation across diverse languages to deepen our insight into the mechanisms of language impairments in neurological disorders.