Linguistic testing during ON/OFF states of electrical stimulation in the associative portion of the subthalamic nucleus.

Introduction: Long-term studies of subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients with Parkinson's disease have shown potential cognitive and linguistic side-effects. In this pilot study, we examined whether direct monopolar stimulation in the ventral, associative STN would result in language effects.

Methods: Three subjects participated in two linguistic tasks targeting language generation (language samples) and language composition (syntactic/grammatical structures).