Cokal, D;
Zimmerer, V;
Varley, R;
Watson, S;
Hinzen, W;
(2019)
Comprehension of embedded clauses in schizophrenia with and without formal thought disorder.
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
, 207
(5)
pp. 384-392.
10.1097/NMD.0000000000000981.
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Abstract
Formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia (SZ) is clinically manifest primarily through language production, where linguistic studies have reported numerous anomalies including lesser use of embedded clauses. Here we explored whether problems of language may extend to comprehension and clause embedding in particular. A sentence-picture matching task was designed with two conditions in which embedded clauses were either presupposed as true (factive) or not. Performance across these two conditions was compared in people with SZ and moderate-to-severe FTD (SZ+FTD), SZ with minimal FTD (SZ-FTD), first degree relatives of people with SZ, and neurotypical controls. The SZ+FTD group performed significantly worse than all others in both conditions, and worse in the non-factive than the factive one. These results demonstrate language dysfunction in comprehension specific to FTD in a critical aspect of grammatical complexity and its associated meaning, which has been independently known to be cognitively significant as well.
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