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Verbal Fluency, Semantics, Context and Symptom Complexes in Schizophrenia

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Abstract

Lexical-semantic access and retrieval was examined in 15 adults diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched controls. This study extends the literature through the inclusion of multiple examinations of lexical-semantic production within the same patient group and through correlating performance on these tasks with various positive and negative clinical symptoms. On tasks of verbal fluency, meaning generation, sentence production using contextual information and confrontation naming, participants with schizophrenia made significantly more semantic errors on naming tasks; produced fewer meanings for homophones; produced fewer items on semantic, phonological, cued and switching fluency tasks; and produced more errors on sentence production tasks when compared to healthy controls. Significant correlations were also observed between ratings of psychomotor poverty and measures of semantic production and mental inflexibility. This study has provided additional evidence for deficits in lexical-semantic retrieval which are not due to underlying semantic store degradation, do not involve phonological based retrieval, and at the level of sentence generation appear to vary as a function of the contextual constraints provided.

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  1. David A. Copland

    Present address: University of Queensland Center for clinical Research, Building 71/918, Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital Campus, Herston, QLD, 4029, Australia

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Neuroscience, University of Melbourne, 7/21 Victoria Street, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia

    Adam P. Vogel

  2. Division of Speech Pathology, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Centre for Research in Language Processing and Linguistics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Helen J. Chenery, Binh Doan, Mildred Tan & David A. Copland

  3. Mater Cochlear Implant Team, Mater Childrens Hospital, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Catriona M. Dart

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Vogel, A.P., Chenery, H.J., Dart, C.M. et al. Verbal Fluency, Semantics, Context and Symptom Complexes in Schizophrenia. J Psycholinguist Res 38, 459–473 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-009-9100-z

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