Barattieri di San Pietro Chiara, Barbieri Elena, Marelli Marco, de Girolamo Giovanni, Luzzatti Claudio
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
J Commun Disord. 2022 Mar-Apr;96:106182. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2022.106182. Epub 2022 Jan 11.
Deficits in language comprehension and production have been repeatedly observed in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders (SSD). However, the characterization of the language profile of this population is far from complete, and the relationship between language deficits, impaired thinking and cognitive functions is widely debated.
The aims of the present study were to assess production and comprehension of verbs with different argument structures, as well as production and comprehension of sentences with canonical and non-canonical word order in people with SSD. In addition, the study investigated the relationship between language deficits and cognitive functions.
Thirty-four participants with a diagnosis of SSD and a group of healthy control participants (HC) were recruited and evaluated using the Italian version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS, Cho-Reyes & Thompson, 2012; Barbieri et al., 2019).
Results showed that participants with SSD were impaired - compared to HC - on both verb and sentence production, as well as on comprehension of syntactically complex (but not simple) sentences. While verb production was equally affected by verb-argument structure complexity in both SSD and HC, sentence comprehension was disproportionately more affected by syntactic complexity in SSD than in HC. In addition, in the SSD group, verb production deficits were predicted by performance on a measure of visual attention, while sentence production and comprehension deficits were explained by performance on measures of executive functions and working memory, respectively.
Our findings support the hypothesis that language deficits in SSD may be one aspect of a more generalized, multi-domain, cognitive impairment, and are consistent with previous findings pointing to reduced inter- and intra-hemispheric connectivity as a possible substrate for such deficits. The study provides a systematic characterization of lexical and syntactic deficits in SSD and demonstrates that psycholinguistically-based assessment tools may be able to capture language deficits in this population.
在精神分裂症谱系障碍（SSD）中，语言理解和表达缺陷屡见不鲜。然而，对这一人群语言特征的描述远未完整，语言缺陷、思维受损和认知功能之间的关系也备受争议。
本研究旨在评估患有SSD的人群对具有不同论元结构的动词的表达和理解，以及对具有规范和非规范词序的句子的表达和理解。此外，该研究还调查了语言缺陷与认知功能之间的关系。
招募了34名被诊断为SSD的参与者和一组健康对照参与者（HC），并使用意大利版的《西北动词和句子评估》（NAVS，Cho-Reyes & Thompson，2012；Barbieri等人，2019）进行评估。
结果显示，与HC相比，患有SSD的参与者在动词和句子表达以及句法复杂（而非简单）句子的理解方面均受损。虽然动词表达在SSD和HC中同样受到动词-论元结构复杂性的影响，但句子理解在SSD中比在HC中受到句法复杂性的影响更大。此外，在SSD组中，视觉注意力测量的表现可预测动词表达缺陷，而句子表达和理解缺陷分别由执行功能和工作记忆测量的表现来解释。
我们的研究结果支持这样的假设，即SSD中的语言缺陷可能是更广泛的多领域认知障碍的一个方面，并且与先前的研究结果一致，这些结果指出半球间和半球内连接减少可能是此类缺陷的一个潜在原因。该研究对SSD中的词汇和句法缺陷进行了系统描述，并表明基于心理语言学的评估工具可能能够捕捉这一人群的语言缺陷。
