Figurative Language Comprehension in Schizophrenia and Its Neural Basis

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a kind of serious mental disease, which may cause major impairment in patients’ social-cognitive ability. It has been found that pragmatic ability in schizophrenic patients is often impaired, especially for figurative language comprehension. Figurative language refers to irony, metaphor, idiom and the like. People with schizophrenia tend to interpret figurative language as its literal meaning, which is called schizophrenic concretism. By reviewing extant literature, we found that the literature concerning this topic mainly consists of two parts: behavioral studies and brain-imaging studies. The behavioral studies mainly explore how clinical factors and cognitive ability have an impact on figurative language comprehension. Brain-imaging studies mainly discuss hemisphere lateralization in schizophrenia and whether theory of mind network in schizophrenic patients is different from that of normal groups. We conclude that future research should further explore the relationship among figurative language comprehension, cognitive ability and clinical factors, and also reveal related neural mechanism.

Effective Connectivity Study Guiding the Neuromodulation Intervention in Figurative Language Comprehension Using Optical Neuroimaging

“…Extensive research has been conducted to reveal the neural resources and brain networks responsible for language comprehension, especially between literal and figurative language in healthy [ 5 ] and clinical population [ 6 ]. Underlying metaphor comprehension is the uniquely human capacity to resolve ambiguity in phrases such as “family is a harbour,” where conceptual mapping [ 7 , 8 ] is needed between the target “family” and its source, “harbour.” The methods related to the investigation of metaphor comprehension have a wide range of applications, reaching from the diagnoses of learning deficits [ 9 ], untangling impairment due to psychosis [ 10 ], to the study of creativity [ 11 ].…”

Pragmatic Language and Schizophrenia: Interpretation of Metaphors

“…Regarding the neural basis of figurative language comprehension in schizophrenia, many studies have found that schizophrenic patients have distinct language lateralization compared with normal people; this abnormal lateralization is believed to be associated to symptoms presented in this disorder 13 .…”