Impairment on verbal fluency tasks has been one of the more consistently reported neuropsychological findings after cerebellar lesions, but it has not been uniformly observed and the possible underlying cognitive basis has not been investigated. We tested twenty-two patients with chronic, unilateral cerebellar lesions (12 Left, 10 Right) and thirty controls on phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. We measured total words produced, words produced in the initial 15 seconds, errors and strategy switches. In the phonemic fluency task, the right cerebellar lesion (RC) group produced significantly fewer words compared to the left cerebellar lesion (LC) group and healthy controls, particularly over the first 15 seconds of the task with no increase in errors and significantly fewer switches over the entire task. In the semantic fluency task there was only a modest decrease in total words in the RC group compared to controls. RC lesions impair fluency with many of the same performance characteristics as left prefrontal lesions. This supports the hypotheses of a prefrontal-lateral cerebellar system for modulation of attention/executive or strategy demanding tasks.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5434417PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/BEN-2010-0269DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

semantic fluency
12
phonemic semantic
8
fluency tasks
8
cerebellar lesions
8
fluency task
8
cerebellar lesion
8
lesion group
8
fluency
6
cerebellar
5
lateralized cerebellar
4

Similar Publications

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!