Froud Karen, Titone Debra, Marantz Alec, Levy Deborah L
Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York NY 10027.
J Neurolinguistics. 2010 May 1;23(3):223-239. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2009.03.001.
Semantic priming has long been used to investigate how concepts and ideas are related at the level of language, and has become a convenient tool for assessing conceptual and semantic dysfunction in cognitive disorders, including schizophrenia. The study of semantic priming in schizophrenia has led to diverse results: enhanced priming, reduced priming, and priming equivalent to that found in nonpsychiatric comparison groups. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain some of the observed deficits in schizophrenia patients. For example, difficulties in word recognition may be due to hyperactivation of too many lexical representations or to a failure to inhibit lexical competitors. One way to distinguish between these possible explanations is to move beyond reliance on behavior alone and to examine the neural processes involved in lexical recognition. Here we present a magnetoencephalographic study of semantic priming in schizophrenia. Importantly, schizophrenia patients and healthy controls did not differ in performance on a priming task. We show that normal behavioral performance can occur in a context of aberrant neural responses. These findings suggest that normal behavioral responses in schizophrenia can be achieved through neural mechanisms that differ from those seen in the psychiatrically well brain.
语义启动效应长期以来一直被用于研究概念和想法在语言层面是如何关联的，并且已成为评估包括精神分裂症在内的认知障碍中概念和语义功能障碍的便捷工具。对精神分裂症中语义启动效应的研究产生了多样的结果：启动效应增强、启动效应减弱以及与非精神疾病对照组相当的启动效应。已经提出了一些假设来解释精神分裂症患者中观察到的部分缺陷。例如，单词识别困难可能是由于过多词汇表征的过度激活，或者是未能抑制词汇竞争者。区分这些可能解释的一种方法是不再仅仅依赖行为，而是检查词汇识别中涉及的神经过程。在此，我们展示一项关于精神分裂症中语义启动效应的脑磁图研究。重要的是，精神分裂症患者和健康对照组在启动任务中的表现并无差异。我们表明，在异常神经反应的情况下可以出现正常的行为表现。这些发现表明，精神分裂症中的正常行为反应可以通过与精神状况良好的大脑中所见不同的神经机制来实现。
