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The time course of building discourse coherence in schizophrenia: An ERP investigation
Author(s) -
Ditman Tali,
Kuperberg Gina R.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00565.x
Subject(s) - psychology , n400 , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , context (archaeology) , thought disorder , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , cognitive psychology , event related potential , developmental psychology , neuroscience , cognition , psychiatry , paleontology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology
Impairments in the buildup and use of context may lead to disorders of thought and language in schizophrenia. To test this hypothesis, event‐related potentials (ERPs) were measured while patients and healthy controls read sentences that were highly causally related, intermediately related, or unrelated to preceding contexts. Although patients were slower than controls, both groups used the discourse context similarly as evidenced by similar reaction time patterns across conditions. Neurally however, different patterns emerged between patients and controls: within the N400 time window, patients failed to modulate their neural responses across conditions. This failure to differentiate between conditions was specifically correlated with positive thought disorder. Results suggest that schizophrenia patients, particularly those with positive thought disorder, fail to make immediate use of discourse context to build up semantic coherence in the brain.