Abstract
Introduction The thalamus is thought to contribute to language-related functions, but specifications of this notion remain vague. Objectives An assessment of potential effects of thalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) on spontaneous language may help to delineate respective functions. Patients and methods For this purpose, we analysed spontaneous language samples from thirteen (six female/seven male) patients with essential tremor (ET) treated with DBS of the thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) in their respective ON vs. OFF conditions. Samples were obtained from semi-structured interviews and examined on multidimensional linguistic levels. The main results were correlated with a more general score of cognitive function. Results In the VIM-DBS ON condition, participants produced significantly less hypotactic sentences compared to the OFF condition. This reduction correlated with the variation of the general cognitive score. Further, active VIM-DBS led to a decreased use of words from the open class. In conclusion, VIM-DBS appears to induce the use of a simplified syntactic and lexical structure. The findings are discussed in relation to the proposed functions of the thalamus for language-related cognitive behavior.
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