Language in Schizophrenia Part 2: What Can Psycholinguistics Bring to the Study of Schizophrenia…and Vice Versa?

Abstract

This is the second of two articles that discuss higher‐order language and semantic processing in schizophrenia. The companion article (Part 1) gives an introduction to language dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia. This article reviews a selection of psycholinguistic studies which suggest that sentence‐level abnormalities in schizophrenia may stem from a relative overdependence on semantic associative relationships at the expense of building higher‐order meaning. Language disturbances in schizophrenia may be best conceptualized as arising from an imbalance of activity across two streams of processing, one directly drawing upon relationships stored within semantic memory and the other involving the use of combinatorial mechanisms to build propositional meaning. This article also discusses some of the ways in which the study of schizophrenia may offer new insights into the cognitive and neural architecture of the normal language system.