Shared lexical-semantic features and the animacy effect in early-course psychosis

Abstract

Language deficits in psychosis, and in schizophrenia, are presumed to be due to increased activation and connectivity of the semantic memory, which is determined by lexical-semantic features of concepts. The aim of this study was to analyse the influence of shared lexical-semantic features on language processing in patients with first-episode and early-course psychosis. The study included 15 Croatian-speaking patients from the University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče, Zagreb, diagnosed with first-episode and early-course psychosis and a healthy control group. The subjects performed a lexical-semantic decision task in which the primes and the target words were either related as hypernym and hyponym or were unrelated, and in which the target words represented either animate or inanimate concepts. Two results analyses were conducted: one on the taxonomic (hyponym-hypernym) condition and one on the animacy (living/non-living stimulus) condition. The patient group was less accurate on the taxonomy condition because the taxonomy relations were dependent on their shared features. The patients' activation of shared features was higher, and their inhibition was reduced. Consequently, the patients will have a greater number of concepts activated and not inhibited. For the inanimate concepts, a high correlation of distinctive features is characteristic, while the animate concepts have a high correlation of shared features. The presupposition is that the greater activation of shared features influenced the patients' answers, so the distinctive features had no influence. Thus, the control group had higher accuracy for inanimate concepts.

Performance on verbal fluency tasks depends on the given category/letter: Preliminary data from a multivariable analysis

“…Neuroscientific research has clearly demonstrated that semantic memory is widely distributed over the cortical surface and the processing of different semantic categories may be associated with disproportionate levels of metabolic activity in different brain regions (Gainotti, 2015;Huth et al, 2016). Furthermore, both theoretical and experimental linguistics agree that different lexical-semantic features such as concreteness/abstractness and animacy/inanimacy underlie divergent cognitive processing mechanisms, while pathological populations may exhibit featurespecific deficits on lexical tasks (Carammaza & Shelton, 1998;Sekulić Sović et al, 2019).…”

Performance on verbal fluency tasks depends on the given category/letter: Preliminary data from a multivariable analysis

“…However, neuroscientific research has clearly demonstrated that semantic memory is widely distributed over the cortical surface and different semantic categories may be associated with disproportionate levels of metabolic activity in different brain regions (Huth et al 2016). Furthermore, both theoretical and experimental linguistics agree that different lexical-semantic features such as concreteness/abstractness and animacy/inanimacy underlie divergent cognitive processing mechanisms (Ventura et al 2005), while pathological populations may exhibit feature-specific deficits on lexical tasks (Carammaza & Shelton 1998;Sekulić Sović et al 2019). Similarly, processing of different phonological categories is associated with different cognitive and neural mechanisms (Lago et al 2015).…”