The effect of cerebellar lesions on language in turkish speakers

The cerebellum is approximately 10% of the brain volume and is responsible for attention, language, emotion and cognitive functions. Linguistic processing difficulties and cognitive impairments may be observed in individuals after cerebellum lesion depending on the location and severity of the damage. The aim of this study was to determine the differences in linguistic and cognitive skills of individuals with cerebellar lesions compared to healthy control group. For this purpose, ADD, Accident Composition Picture, Line Direction Identification Test, Face Recognition Test, Letter Deletion Test were applied and the data obtained were compared with Mann Whitney U test in SPSS (25th version) program. Individuals with cerebellar lesions performed poorly on the total score and all subtests of ADD. They were found to produce higher frequencies of effort, inter-verbal pauses, simple sentence production, hesitation expressions, filler expressions and anomic patterns in narrative examples. Significant impairment was found in non-verbal cognitive skills (Letter Erasure Test, Face Recognition Test, Line Orientation Test) compared to the healthy control group. Cerebellar lesions have been found to cause linguistic involvement reflected in formal language assessments without a diagnosis of aphasia. It was observed that individuals with cerebellar lesions had decreased syntactic complexity during verbal production and increased disfluency behaviors that disrupted speech continuity. weakness in executive functions. As a result, it is necessary to evaluate the language, speech and executive functions of individuals with cerebellar lesions.