Tavano Alessandro, Sponda Silvia, Fabbro Franco, Perlini Cinzia, Rambaldelli Gianluca, Ferro Adele, Cerruti Stefania, Tansella Michele, Brambilla Paolo
Scientific Institute E. Medea, Udine, Italy.
Schizophr Res. 2008 Jul;102(1-3):53-62. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2008.02.008. Epub 2008 Apr 7.
Verbal communication impairments are prominent features of schizophrenia. The grammatical and pragmatic components of expressive and receptive verbal abilities were systematically examined, for the first time, in Italian patients with schizophrenia. Indeed, most of the language literature is composed of studies on English speaking people.
Elicited narrative production, and syntactic and pragmatic receptive abilities were analyzed in a cohort of 37 patients with schizophrenia and 37 healthy controls. Furthermore, a conversational speech production task was administered to an age- and gender-matched subset of this population. The level of significance was set at p<or=0.01.
Participants with schizophrenia produced significantly less words on the narrative task and were less fluent on the conversational task than healthy controls. In both narrative and conversational speech they showed significantly poorer syntactic diversity skills. Errors at word level did not distinguish the two groups. At a receptive level, syntactic abilities were selectively impaired in patients with schizophrenia, who were also slower than controls in providing their answers. Metaphor and idiom explanations revealed consistent deficits in patients with respect to controls.
Reduced syntactic diversity characterized expressive language skills in schizophrenia. Syntactic abilities were selectively impaired also at the receptive level, suggesting an underlying processing deficit. On the pragmatic test schizophrenia patients were significantly less able to produce appropriate interpretations, indicating the presence of abnormal pragmatic inferential abilities. These findings confirm that language impairment is a key feature of schizophrenia independent of mother language and suggest a possible deficit involving hemispheric lateralization processes.
言语交流障碍是精神分裂症的突出特征。本研究首次对意大利精神分裂症患者的表达性和接受性言语能力的语法及语用成分进行了系统检查。事实上，大多数语言文献都是关于说英语人群的研究。
对37例精神分裂症患者和37名健康对照者进行了诱发叙事产出、句法及语用接受能力分析。此外，对该人群中年龄和性别匹配的一个子集进行了对话言语产出任务。显著性水平设定为p≤0.01。
与健康对照者相比，精神分裂症患者在叙事任务中产出的单词明显较少，在对话任务中流畅性较差。在叙事和对话言语中，他们的句法多样性技能均显著较差。单词层面的错误并未区分两组。在接受性层面，精神分裂症患者的句法能力选择性受损，他们给出答案的速度也比对照组慢。隐喻和习语解释显示患者相对于对照者存在持续的缺陷。
句法多样性降低是精神分裂症表达性语言技能的特征。句法能力在接受性层面也选择性受损，提示存在潜在的加工缺陷。在语用测试中，精神分裂症患者产生恰当解释的能力明显较低，表明存在异常的语用推理能力。这些发现证实语言障碍是精神分裂症的一个关键特征，与母语无关，并提示可能存在涉及半球侧化过程的缺陷。
