Background:
Schizophrenia is characterized by disturbances in language and thought. Semantic priming (SP) paradigms have been frequently used to investigate language function in schizophrenia. The SP effect is the reaction time advantage that is achieved by priming a target to which a participant is responding with a semantically or associatively related word. In schizophrenia, this area of research has produced many contradictory results.
Methods:
This is a comprehensive up-to-date review of research on SP in schizophrenia. It considers the significance of the specific task parameters used and the characteristics of the patient sample as possible reasons underlying discrepancies.
Results:
From this review, it has been established that there are two robust variables that produce different results in schizophrenia. First, the relatedness proportion effect, where low proportions of related prime-target pairs result in reduced or normal SP in people with schizophrenia, while higher proportions lead to increased SP. Second, using indirectly related prime-target pairs results in increased SP in schizophrenia. Further, in terms of patient characteristics, patients with thought disorder produce the most consistently abnormal SP results.
Conclusions:
The results indicate that enhanced automatic spread of activation might be one of the causes of language deficits in schizophrenia. In the framework of distributed network models, it is possible that the patterns of representations overlap more between different or unusual concepts in people with schizophrenia compared with healthy people, especially those with the symptom of thought disorder.
