Title : Action concept deficits are embodied in a topographic manner in adults with cerebral palsy: ERP evidence
Abstract:
In Cerebral Palsy (CP) children commonly experience semantic deficits. The cause of semantic deficits, and persistence of these cognitive challenges into adulthood, are unknown. The social network hypothesis states decreased frequency of language use in CP individuals leads to impoverished lexico-semantic representations. The embodied cognition hypothesis emphasizes the role of the motor system in processing action concepts. In this study, 9 participants with CP and 9 matched NT controls first completed a sentence-reading task (Experiment 1) while their event related potentials (ERPs) to semantically incongruent sentences were collected. No evidence was found that CP individuals process domain-general semantic incongruence differently to neurotypicals. In Experiment 2, participants made action decisions on lower-limb (kick), upper-limb (grab) and psychological verbs (believe) in an identity-priming paradigm. The ERP component of interest was the N400. The N400 magnitudes were reduced in CP individuals for action verbs but not for psychological verbs. Taken together, these results suggest that (a) semantic deficits are present in adults with CP, but (b) they are restricted to action verbs.
