Functional mapping of semantic association in schizophrenia
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1
Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Institute of Living, United States
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2
Monash University, Monash Biomedical Imaging/School of Psychology & Psychiatry, Australia
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3
Yale University, Departments of Psychiatry & Neurobiology, United States
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4
Yale University, Department of Psychiatry, United States
Individuals with schizophrenia show a broad range of language impairments, including abnormalities in verbal production and comprehension, reduced sentence complexity and semantic processing deficits. Here, I will present the results of two recent studies of language dysfunction in schizophrenia using the Semantic Object Retrieval Task (SORT). SORT indexes non-compositional semantic association, where participants are presented with word-pairs that either recall a third unpresented word (e.g. ‘honey’ and ‘stings’ activates ‘bees’, Retrieval trials) or do not (e.g. ‘teacher’ and ‘plastic’, No-Retrieval trials). Individuals with schizophrenia reported more associations between unrelated word pairs than healthy controls, and this over-retrieval increased with formal thought disorder severity. Individuals with schizophrenia also failed to report associations between related word pairs, this under-retrieval increased with negative symptom severity. Retrieval vs. no-retrieval trials activated a distributed fronto-parietal-temporal network, group differences (FWE p<.05) were obtained in bilateral inferior parietal lobule, with schizophrenia showing significantly reduced activity in this region compared to healthy controls. The IPL plays a central role in both the semantic system and heteromodal association network, serving as a ‘supramodal convergence zone’, binding representations from multiple sensory/motor/affective zones to allow efficient, rapid processing of the current context. Implications of the results for models of the semantic system and psycholinguistic impairment in schizophrenia will be explored.
Keywords:
semantic association,
fMRI,
Schizophrenia,
Bipolar Disorder,
inferior parietal lobule (IPL)
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Symposium Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Jamadar
S,
Pearlson
G and
Assaf
M
(2012). Functional mapping of semantic association in schizophrenia.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00004
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Received:
26 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
26 Oct 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Sharna Jamadar, Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Institute of Living, Hartford, Connecticut, 06106, United States, sharna.jamadar@monash.edu