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Differential impairment in semantic, phonemic, and action fluency performance in Friedreich's ataxia: Possible evidence of prefrontal dysfunction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2007

ÉRIKA DE NÓBREGA ,
ANTONIETA NIETO ,
JOSÉ BARROSO  and
FERNANDO MONTÓN
ÉRIKA DE NÓBREGA
Affiliation:
Faculty of Psychology, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
ANTONIETA NIETO
Affiliation:
Faculty of Psychology, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
JOSÉ BARROSO
Affiliation:
Faculty of Psychology, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
FERNANDO MONTÓN
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, N.S.C. University Hospital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
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Abstract

This study examined phonemic (letters), semantic (animals) and action verbal fluency cues in twenty-four patients with FRDA, and twenty matched healthy control subjects. The Action Fluency Test (AFT) is a newly-developed verbal fluency cue that consists in asking the subject to rapidly generate verbs. Given the high presence of dysarthria and cognitive slowness in FRDA patients, control tasks were administered in order to dissociate motor/articulatory impairment and cognitive slowness from verbal fluency deficit. Results showed that patients and control subjects performed similarly on the semantic fluency task. In contrast, patients performed significantly poorer on phonemic and action fluency tests. Correlational analyses showed that the deficits cannot be attributed to dysarthria or cognitive slowness. Although executive processes are necessary for initiating and monitoring all verbal fluency tasks, phonemic and action fluency may place a greater burden on strategic processes, given that they require a more unusual type of lexicon search. Thus, the deficits found occur in tasks that require greater executive/prefrontal control. This impairment might be the result of an affectation of cerebellum-prefrontal cortex connections, although the possibility of a primary prefrontal dysfunction remains to be investigated. (JINS, 2007, 13, 944–952.)

Keywords

CerebellumCognitionExecutive functionsCerebellar ataxiaVerb generationLanguage
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 13 , Issue 6 , November 2007 , pp. 944 - 952
Copyright
© 2007 The International Neuropsychological Society

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