Language and Thinking in Psychosis

The time course of building discourse coherence in schizophrenia: An ERP investigation

“…Building a coherent representation of discourse meaning, however, also requires the establishment of logical and psychological consistency between the events and propositions described in individual sentences. There is some evidence from memory paradigms that schizophrenia patients fail to use such coherence links across sentences to improve recall of individual sentences (Harvey, Earle‐Boyer, Weilgus, & Levinson, 1986; Speed, Toner, Shugar, & Di Gasbarro, 1991), and early studies suggested that patients with low premorbid histories failed to extract the “gist” from groups of individually presented sentences (Knight & Sims‐Knight, 1979; although see Grove & Andreasen, 1985). Analogous findings using visual picture stories have recently been described by Brune and Bodenstein (2005).…”

Prospects for a cognitive‐developmental account of psychotic experiences

“…For example, fluctuations in positive symptoms are associated with changes in negative affect (Myin‐Germeys, Nicolson, & Delespaul, 2001), a phenomenon that seems to be unconnected to neurocognitive impairment (Myin‐Germeys, Krabbendam, Jolles, Delespaul, & van Os, 2002). Even in the case of positive thought disorder, the one positive symptom that has been consistently associated with neurocognitive impairment, symptom exacerbation, occurs when patients are asked to discuss personally salient themes (Docherty, Evans, Sledge, Seibyl, & Krystal, 1994; Haddock, Wolfenden, Lowens, Tarrier, & Bentall, 1995; Tai, Haddock, & Bentall, 2004). Negative self‐esteem has also been implicated in positive symptoms and appears to mediate the relationship between adverse family environments and symptom exacerbation (Barrowclough et al , 2003).…”

“…However, whereas these deficits are strongly associated with poor social functioning, they are only weakly associated with negative symptoms and hardly associated at all with positive symptoms (Green, 1998). The only exception appears to be positive thought disorder (incoherent speech), which is related to working memory (Grove & Andreasen, 1985) and semantic memory deficits (Spitzer, 1997).…”

High Order Linguistic Features Such as Ambiguity Processing as Relevant Diagnostic Markers for Schizophrenia

“…Particularly vague and ambiguous terms seem to irritate patients with schizophrenia. Some studies investigating comprehension deficits attributed reduced comprehension to deficient working memory [17], and some found deficits in semantic processing [18]. …”