Schizophrenia has been suggested to involve linguistic pragmatic deficits. In this study, two aspects of pragmatic ability were assessed; comprehension and production. Drawing on relevance theory and Gricean implicatures to assess shared attention and interpretation in a linguistic context, discourse samples and proverb interpretation were transcribed from recorded interviews with patients with schizophrenia and control subjects. The productive aspect of implicatures was assessed by quantifying the use of 'connectors' in discourse. Receptive aspects were assessed by scoring interpretations of four common proverbs. Statistically significant effects were found: patients with schizophrenia used connectors less than controls as well as performing worse in proverb comprehension. Positive correlations between connectors and proverb interpretation in all subjects suggested an underlying pragmatic root for both productive and receptive aspects. The relative number of connectors (as a percentage of words used) provided a better index of pragmatic ability than total number because total output appeared to be influenced by additional factors such as IQ. Deficits were found in the use of connectors and in proverb interpretation even when controlling for verbal IQ, suggesting that pragmatic aspects of language are particularly vulnerable in schizophrenia compared with other verbal abilities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.