Action (verb) fluency deficits in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: linking language, cognition and interpersonal functioning

Smirnova, Daria; Clark, Melanie L.; Jablensky, Assen; Badcock, Johanna C.

doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2017.07.044

Cited by 19 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Results in category fluency tasks, in which participants are instructed to generate members of a given semantic category, such as "fruits", are considered a robust measure of semantic memory function (Neill et al, 2014a), and have been shown to be impaired in patients with schizophrenia (Henry and Crawford, 2005;Smirnova et al, 2017). Kiang and Kutas (2006) analyzed responses to four category fluency tasks in a sample of volunteers varying in schizotypal traits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Rodríguez‐Ferreiro

Aguilera

2019

Psychiatry Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Semantic disturbances have been proposed as a possible cause of formal thought disorder in schizophrenia. Fluency tasks, in which volunteers are asked to produce as many exemplars as they can for a given category during one minute, are usually applied to the assessment of semantic processing. However, studies associating fluency and proneness to psychosis have provided conflicting results so it is not clear whether these disturbances can be identified at subclinical stages. We conducted two experiments. In the first one, 71 volunteers completed written category fluency tasks with four semantic categories (animals, fruits, clothing and vehicles). In the second experiment, 77 new participants completed oral category and phonological fluency tasks (words starting with f, t, p and c). In both experiments, we assessed schizotypal personality and vocabulary size. Schizotypal traits were not reliably associated with either productivity or originality of the responses in any experiment. In contrast, vocabulary size significantly predicted the participants' scores in all the tasks. Along with results of other recent studies, our data cast doubt on the reliability of previous observations pointing out an association between schizotypy and lexical-semantic disturbances, at least in relation to productivity and originality in fluency tests.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Rodríguez‐Ferreiro

Aguilera

2019

Psychiatry Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The present study aimed to investigate the integrity of the cognitive representation of the thematic grids of verbs in people with SSD. Based on studies that identified an impaired verbal (action) fluency (Badcock et al, 2011;Kambanaros et al, 2010;Marvel et al, 2004;Smirnova et al, 2017;Woods et al, 2007) and an impaired sense of Self (Haug et al, 2012;Henriksen & Noordgard, 2014;Postmes et al, 2014;Nordgaard et al, 2018) possibly related with the linguistic knowledge of the "Agent" thematic role, we expected higher tolerability to a semantic violation on the Agent in people with SSD than in the healthy population. More specifically, we expected people with SSD to display no cognitive difficulty when processing sentences with animacy violations on the Agent subject, indicating the lack of an (implicit) anomaly detection process, along with the suboptimal integration abilities already observed in this clinical population (Kuperberg et al, 2006a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Previous studies have indeed reported an underperforming word retrieval (Covington et al, 2005) as well as defective processing of words coming from high lexical competitor environments (high density and high-frequency lexical neighbourhoods) (Titone & Levy, 2004) among people with schizophrenia. Studies on verb naming seem to converge towards a significant impairment of action fluency in this clinical population (Badcock et al, 2011;Kambanaros et al, 2010;Marvel et al, 2004;Smirnova et al, 2017;Woods et al, 2007), with a specific difficulty in the attribution of "agency", occurring within the cortical network responsible for the representation of actions (Jeannerod, 2009). However, when considered in the context of a sentence, verb processing entails both semantic and syntactic processing, and previous research in this clinical population identified a relative insensitivity to linguistic violations requiring the contribution of both syntax and semantics (Kuperberg et al, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Sleeping Stones and Other Implausible Agents: Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Pietro¹,

Girolamo²,

Luzzatti³

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study aimed at testing the presence of a disrupted lexical representation of verbs thematic grid in people with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (SSD).A silent-reading task was administered to 32 people with SSD and 32 matched healthy participants (HP). Stimuli were sentences including or not a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the subject. Data on Gaze Duration (GD), Total Fixation Duration (TFD) on verbs, and probability of go-back movements from the verb were recorded.When the anomalous grammatical subject was the Agent of the event, we found a significant increase of GD in HCs, but not in SSDs. In addition, when the anomalous subject was a Theme, SSDs displayed an increased probability of regressions, unlike HCs.These results are suggestive of a higher tolerability for anomalous Agents in SSD compared to the normal population, possibly derived from a disrupted lexical representation of the verb thematic grid.

show abstract

“…Selective impairments of concrete versus abstract words have been documented since the 1970s [9]. For example, there are reports that both patients of Parkinson's disease without mild cognitive impairment [10] and patients of schizophrenia spectrum disorders [11] display selective impairments of concrete action verbs (e.g., swim, push) in language production tasks. Moreover, research on Alzheimer's disease (AD) and semantic dementia (SD) suggests that processing concrete and abstract words implicate partially dissociable brain networks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concreteness/abstractness ratings for two-character Chinese words in MELD-SCH

2020

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The concreteness-abstractness continuum is considered a primary dimension in the representation of semantic networks. Its theoretical importance and clinical significance are widely acknowledged. To assist and enhance future research, this study collected and evaluated concreteness/abstractness ratings for 9,877 two-character Chinese words retrieved from the MEga study of Lexical Decision in Simplified CHinese (MELD-SCH, Tsang et al, 2018). The ratings were validated through comparisons with previous rating studies on concreteness and imageability of smaller word samples. Relations of word concreteness with word frequency, age-of-acquisition, and efficiency of lexical processing were also examined. These ratings provide an additional dimension of information to two-character words in the database MELD-SCH, permitting not only more comprehensive research on the Chinese language, but also cross-language investigation of the concreteness effect between Chinese and other languages such as English and Dutch where a large database of concreteness ratings is also available.

show abstract

Action (verb) fluency deficits in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: linking language, cognition and interpersonal functioning

Cited by 19 publications

References 77 publications

Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Sleeping Stones and Other Implausible Agents: Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Concreteness/abstractness ratings for two-character Chinese words in MELD-SCH

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About