Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROLINGUISTICS
Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages 223-239Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2009.03.001
Keywords
Language; Schizophrenia; Semantic priming; MEG; Magnetoencephalography
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Semantic priming has long been used to investigate how concepts and ideas are related at the level of language, and has become a convenient tool for assessing conceptual and semantic dysfunction in cognitive disorders, including schizophrenia. The study of semantic priming in schizophrenia has led to diverse results: enhanced priming, reduced priming, and priming equivalent to that found in nonpsychiatric comparison groups. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain some of the observed deficits in schizophrenia patients. For example, difficulties in word recognition may be due to hyperactivation of too many lexical representations or to a failure to inhibit lexical competitors. One way to distinguish between these possible explanations is to move beyond reliance on behavior alone and to examine the neural processes involved in lexical recognition. Here we present a magnetoencephalographic study of semantic priming in schizophrenia. Importantly, schizophrenia patients and healthy controls did not differ in performance on a priming task. We show that normal behavioral performance can occur in a context of aberrant neural responses. These findings suggest that normal behavioral responses in schizophrenia can be achieved through neural mechanisms that differ from those seen in the psychiatrically well brain. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available