Disordered semantic activation in disorganized discourse in schizophrenia: a new pragma‐linguistic tool for structure and meaning reconstruction

Abstract

Latent sources, motivations and even meanings, at least to some extent, of seemingly disorganized utterances can become analysable through linguistic analyses. The results suggest that continuity in the treatment is essential, because a practitioner who shares background knowledge with the patient has better opportunities to capture the relevance of the superficially disorganized utterances. Moreover, especially the most disorganized sequences should warrant thorough attention because they can convey, beneath their unexpected or obscure surface structure, items which are psychologically important to the patient. The results of this study should be taken into account in the training of interactional skills of professionals who work with schizophrenia patients.

Follow-up of N400 in the Rehabilitation of First-episode Schizophrenia

“…Andrews reported that the positive symptoms score of thought and attention disorder was negatively correlated with the average N400 amplitude in a time-window of 300–500 ms.[ 1 ] Until now, it is unclear if N400 reduction relates to real-world functioning and recovery. [ 14 15 ] This study found that the prolongation of N400 latency and decrease of N400 amplitude were negatively correlated with PANSS total score and positive symptoms score.…”

“…The N400 component of event-related potentials (ERP) has recently drawn widespread attention at home and abroad. Its clinical value is that, not only is it most frequently used to assess diseases associated with linguistic disorder in the department of neurology and psychiatry,[ 1 2 ] but also, to effectively improve patients’ linguistic disorder has become an important candidate target of the research and development on the new generation of anti-psychotic drugs. [ 3 4 ] This research enrolled patients with first-episode schizophrenia (FES), who had never taken any antipsychotic drugs before, and carried out a 1-year follow-up on them.…”

Neuropsychological screening for schizophrenia: A brief tool to assess subtypes of schizophrenia

“…Disorganized thinking in schizophrenia is associated with a reduction of fractional anisotropy in medial longitudinal fasciculus, which connects all the language regions, 19 justifying the alterations in the verbal fluency 20 and semantic in the hebephrenic patient. 21 This subtype also presents orbital, cingulated 22 and dorsolateral circuits dysfunction, 23 indicating a frontal multi-circuit deterioration, aiming a dark prognosis, even when psychotic symptoms have been controlled. 24 The subtypes of schizophrenia were recently eliminated by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DMS-V), 14 due to the fact that almost all patients developed criteria for more than one subtype of schizophrenia during the illness course and generally are less used by psychiatrists.…”