Slips of the tongue in patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome

In this webinar, Carina Robert presents the article “Slips of the tongue in patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome”.

Motor and vocal tics are main symptoms of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) and are assumed to be caused by altered cognitive control processes. Various studies have examined changes in cognitive control during motor performance tasks, but the findings are inconclusive. In this context, vocal tics remain largely unexplored, although speech production itself requires a high degree of cognitive control. Particularly coprolalia, the utterance of taboo words that are normally suppressed due to social inappropriateness, implies that cognitive control processes may be altered in GTS.

In Carina's words:

In this study, we used the previously established “Spoonerisms of Laboratory Induced Predisposition” paradigm to induce slips of the tongue in form of neutral and taboo spoonerisms in patients with GTS and a matched control group. We aimed to investigate the control of the unintentional pronunciation of taboo words and the associated processes of conflict monitoring. We expected to find differences at the behavioural and the electrophysiological level between the two conditions of neutral and taboo words for both groups.

At the behavioural level, few spoonerisms occurred, with fewer taboo than neutral spoonerisms produced in both groups, without significant differences. Delayed speech onset times in correct trials indicated greater involvement of cognitive control in the taboo condition, along with fewer taboo spoonerisms uttered in both groups.

The ERP results revealed a difference between the taboo and neutral word conditions in the GTS group at the midline electrodes within a time range of 250-400 ms after the speech prompt, which was not found in the control group. The magnitude of this effect depended on the number of inductor word pairs, suggesting an increasing level of cognitive control in the GTS group.

Suggested articles

• Presented article: Carina Robert, Ronja Weiblen, Tobias A. Wagner‐Altendorf, Theresa Paulus, Kirsten Müller‐ Vahl, Alexander Münchau, Ulrike M. Krämer, Marcus Heldmann, VeitRoessner and Thomas F. Münte (2024) Slips of the tongue in patients with Gillesde la Tourette syndrome. Neuro- logical Research and Practice, Volume 6,Article number 25 doi

• Development of SLIP Task: Motley, M.T. and Baars, B.J. (1976). Laboratoryinduction of verbal slips: a new method for psycholinguistic research.Communication Quarterly 24, 28–34. doi
• SLIP Task studies: Möller, J., Jansma, B.M., Rodriguez-Fornells,A., and Münte, T.F. (2007). What the brain does before the tongue slips.Cerebral Cortex 17, 1173–1178. doi
• Severens, E., Janssens, I., Kühn, S., Brass,M., and Hartsuiker, R.J. (2011). When the brain tames the tongue: covertediting of inappropriate language. Psychophysiology 48, 1252–1257. doi
• Wagner-Altendorf, T.A., Gottschlich, C.,Robert, C., Cirkel, A., Heldmann, M., and Münte, T.F. (2020). The suppressionof taboo word spoonerisms is associated with altered medial frontal negativity:an ERP study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 14. doi

Short bio

Carina Robert completed her Bachelor’s degree in "Integrated Life Sciences" at the “Friedrich-Alexander-University” in Erlangen, and then moved to Oldenburg to pursue her Master’s degree in “Neuroscience”at the “Carl von Ossietzky University”.

For her Master’s thesis, she worked with patients with Parkinson’s disease and EEG in the Clinical Systems Neuroscience group in Marburg, and continued to work in the research group after graduation. She is about to finish her PhD in the research group of Marcus Heldmann and Thomas F. Münte at the University of Lübeck. Her project is part of the TEC4Tic project, which is a collaborative project between Dresden and Lübeck to study Tourette syndrome.

You may contact Carina Robert here.