A case of impaired verbalization but preserved gesticulation of motion events.

David Kemmerer*, Bharath Chandrasekaran, Daniel Tranel

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

In most cultures, most of the time, when people talk they gesture. We took advantage of a rare opportunity to explore the relation between the verbalization and gesticulation of motion events by studying Marcel, an English speaker with a unilateral left-hemisphere lesion affecting frontal, parietal, and temporal sectors of the perisylvian cortex. Marcel has intact semantic knowledge of the three major classes of words that are commonly used in English descriptions of motion events - specifically, concrete nouns, action verbs, and spatial prepositions - as well as intact syntactic knowledge of how these word classes are typically combined in the intransitive motion construction (e.g., The ball rolled down the hill). However, his ability to retrieve the lexical-phonological structures of these words is severely impaired. Despite this profound anomia, he is still remarkably skilled at producing iconic manual depictions of motion events, as demonstrated in two experiments involving spontaneous gestures and one experiment involving elicited gestures. Moreover, the structural characteristics of Marcel's gestures are clearly sensitive to the idiosyncratic meanings of English verbs and prepositions, and they may also be sensitive to the way motion events are syntactically packaged in the intransitive motion construction. These findings improve our understanding of how some brain-damaged individuals with severe aphasia but without manual apraxia can successfully employ gesture to augment the semantic content of their speech.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)70-114
Number of pages45
JournalCognitive Neuropsychology
Volume24
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2007

Funding

Supported in part by Program Project Grant NINDS NS19632. We thank Ken Manzel for assistance in collecting some of the data, Kathy Jones and Ruth Henson for help in scheduling Marcel’s research appointments, Hanna Damasio for conducting the neuroanatomical analysis, Vimal Guru Pazhaniswamy for preparing Figure 3, and Diane Brentari, Natalya Kaganovich, Mariel Perez, and Ronnie Wilbur for commenting on previous versions of the manuscript. We also thank the Language and Gesture Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for helpful feedback on this case study. Last but not least, we thank Marcel for his unfailingly cooperative and good-humoured participation in numerous testing sessions.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
  • Developmental and Educational Psychology
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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