Grammatical processing in schizophrenia: Evidence from morphology

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:48

Article

Walenski, Matthew¹  Weickert, Thomas W.^2,3,4  Maloof, Christopher J.⁵  Ullman, Michael T.⁵ 

[1] Univ Calif San Diego, Dept Psychol, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA

[2] NIMH, Clin Brain Disorders Branch, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892 USA

[3] Univ New S Wales, Sch Psychiat, Sydney, NSW 2031, Australia

[4] Prince Wales Med Res Inst, Sydney, NSW 2031, Australia

[5] Georgetown Univ, Dept Neurosci, Washington, DC 20007 USA

关键词: Inflection;    Prefrontal cortex;    Temporal lobe;    Striatum;    Thought disorder;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.012

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Patients with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia commonly present with impaired language. Here we investigate language in schizophrenia with a focus on inflectional morphology, using an intensively studied and relatively well-understood linguistic paradigm. Patients with schizophrenia (n = 43) and age-matched healthy control subjects (n = 42) were asked to produce past tenses of regular (slip), irregular (swim), and novel (plag) English verbs. Patients were impaired at regulars and novels (slipped, plagged), with relative sparing of irregulars (swam), controlling for numerous subject- and item-specific factors (e.g., IQ, phonological complexity). Additionally, patients' thought-disorder scores significantly predicted their performance at regular and novel (but not irregular) past-tense production. The results support grammatical deficits in schizophrenia, with a relative sparing of lexical memory, and suggest that thought disorder may be linked with grammatical impairments in the disorder. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

【 授权许可】

Free