Schaeken Walter, Van de Weyer Linde, De Hert Marc, Wampers Martien
Brain and Cognition, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
University Psychiatric Center KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Front Psychol. 2021 May 6;12:635724. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635724. eCollection 2021.
A number of studies have demonstrated pragmatic language difficulties in people with Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders. However, research about how people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders understand scalar implicatures (SIs) is surprisingly rare, since SIs have generated much of the most recent literature. Scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences, based on linguistic expressions like , , , which are part of a scale of informativeness (e.g., ). Logically, the less informative expressions imply the more informative ones, but pragmatically people usually infer that the presence of a less informative term implies that the more informative term was not applicable. In one of the few existing studies with people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, Wampers et al. (2018) observed that in general, people with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders were less likely to derive SIs than controls. The current study has three main aims. First, we want to replicate the original finding with the scalar terms . Second, we want to investigate how these patients deal with different scalar terms, that is, we want to investigate if scalar diversity is also observed in this clinical group. Third, we investigate the role of working memory, often seen as another important mechanism to enable inferring SIs. Twenty-one individuals with a psychotic disorder and 21 matched controls answered 54 under-informative statements, in which seven different pairs of scalar terms were used. In addition, working memory capacity was measured. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders did not make more logical interpretations when processing quantifiers, disconfirming Wampers et al. (2018). However, certain scalar scales elicited more pragmatic interpretations than others, which is in line with the scalar diversity hypothesis. Additionally, we observed only partial evidence for the role of working memory. Only for the scalar scale , a significant effect of working memory was observed. The implications of these results for patients with schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are discussed, but also the role of working memory for pragmatic inferences, as well as the place of SIs in experimental pragmatics.
多项研究表明，精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者存在语用语言困难。然而，关于精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者如何理解等级含义（SIs）的研究却出奇地少，尽管等级含义引发了近期的大量文献探讨。等级含义是基于诸如“一些”“某些”“几个”等语言表达的语用推理，这些表达是信息性等级的一部分（例如，“所有＞大多数＞许多＞一些＞几个”）。从逻辑上讲，信息性较低的表达意味着信息性较高的表达，但在语用上，人们通常推断使用信息性较低的术语意味着信息性较高的术语不适用。在为数不多的针对精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者的现有研究中，万佩斯等人（2018年）观察到，总体而言，精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者比对照组更不容易得出等级含义。本研究有三个主要目的。第一，我们想用等级术语“一些”“某些”“几个”来重复最初的发现。第二，我们想研究这些患者如何处理不同的等级术语，也就是说，我们想研究在这个临床群体中是否也能观察到等级多样性。第三，我们研究工作记忆的作用，工作记忆通常被视为另一种能够推断等级含义的重要机制。21名患有精神病性障碍的个体和21名匹配的对照组回答了54条信息不足的陈述，其中使用了七对不同的等级术语。此外，还测量了工作记忆容量。精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者在处理量词时并没有做出更多符合逻辑的解释，这与万佩斯等人（2018年）的研究结果不符。然而，某些等级量表比其他量表引发了更多的语用解释，这与等级多样性假设一致。此外，我们仅观察到部分证据支持工作记忆的作用。仅在等级量表“一些”“某些”“几个”上，观察到了工作记忆的显著影响。我们讨论了这些结果对精神分裂症谱系及其他精神病性障碍患者的意义，同时也讨论了工作记忆在语用推理中的作用，以及等级含义在实验语用学中的地位。
