Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Mar;48(4):1032-40. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.11.030. Epub 2009 Dec 4.
Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal structural changes and dysexecutive behavioural deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive tasks. In this study, idiom comprehension was evaluated by means of a sentence-to-picture-matching task in 45 schizophrenic patients and 45 control subjects, matched for age and educational level. The task included 62 idiomatic and 62 literal sentences. Participants were presented with a written sentence, either literal or idiomatic, followed by a picture, which appeared below the sentence. They were instructed to judge whether the picture represented the meaning of the sentence or not, and responded by pressing one of two response keys. Half of the items correctly represented the meaning, half did not. Reaction times and accuracy were measured. Schizophrenics were impaired in both types of idiomatic sentence. However, their performance was particularly poor in the case of ambiguous idioms. Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Digit Sequencing were the unique predictors of performance for idiom comprehension in general, while thought disorganization was not. Cognitive decline either did not appear to predict performance.
最近关于成语理解的 fMRI 和 TMS 研究表明，前额叶皮层参与了成语处理。由于精神分裂症患者表现出前额叶结构变化和执行行为缺陷，我们假设他们在成语理解方面存在障碍，与执行任务的表现相关。在这项研究中，我们通过句子到图片匹配任务评估了 45 名精神分裂症患者和 45 名匹配年龄和教育程度的对照组的成语理解能力。任务包括 62 个惯用和 62 个字面句子。参与者首先看到一个文字或惯用的句子，然后是一张图片，图片出现在句子下方。他们被指示判断图片是否代表句子的意思，并通过按下两个响应键之一来做出响应。一半的项目正确地代表了意思，一半没有。测量了反应时间和准确性。精神分裂症患者在两种类型的成语句子中都表现出障碍。然而，他们在歧义成语的情况下表现特别差。威斯康星卡片分类测试和数字排序是成语理解表现的唯一预测因素，而思维混乱不是。认知能力下降似乎也不能预测表现。
