0000000000447545
AUTHOR
Chrystel Besche-richard
Lexical decision tasks in depressive patients: semantic priming before and after clinical improvement.
SummaryThis study was designed to evaluate the effect of semantic priming with a lexical decision task in 22 depressed patients (DSM-III-R, 1987) and 30 control subjects. These patients were evaluated twice: first when they arrived at the hospital, and secondly, after clinical improvement. Clinical improvement was evaluated using standard depression rating scales. A lexical decision task involving semantic relations (related vs. unrelated, e.g., apple-pear) was used to evaluate the processing of semantic information. The results showed that, for the first evaluation, the depressives presented similar semantic priming to control subjects. When we compared semantic priming in the first and th…
Semantic context-processing deficit in thought-disordered schizophrenic patients: Evidence from new semantic priming paradigms
Introduction. Disorders in the processing of the semantic context are now a well-established phenomenon in thought-disordered (TD) schizophrenic patients, and have been revealed especially well by studies that have made use of the experimental paradigm of lexical decision tasks coupled with semantic priming. The main question addressed by this study was the evaluation of the experimental conditions under which TD schizophrenic patients are able to deploy cognitive strategies for semantic context processing. Methods. We studied semantic priming in two double lexical decision tasks (i.e., involving the explicit processing of the prime word) using a sequential presentation of words (stimulus o…
Fluency versus conscious recollection in category-production performance: the performance of schizophrenic patients.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative contribution in schizophrenics of automatic processes (fluency) and conscious processes (conscious recollection) for the control of preencoded material in category production tasks. In one condition (Exclusion condition), subjects were told specifically not to produce previously presented words during the category-production task. This condition was compared with a standard category-production task in which subjects were told to produce the six first words that came to mind for a semantic category (Inclusion condition). In the inclusion condition, the effects of conscious control and automatic processes operated in the same direction…
Double-decision lexical tasks in thought-disordered schizophrenic patients: a path towards cognitive remediation?
Abstract It has been shown that schizophrenics have certain difficulties in the processing of semantic context. These difficulties have usually been evaluated using lexical decision tasks with semantic priming. In this study, we chose to examine the idea of an abnormality in the early stages of semantic context processing in thought-disordered schizophrenics using two double lexical decision tasks: one with a high (25%) and one with a low (15%) proportion of related words to assess the participants’ competency in controlled and possibly also more automatic context processing. The results obtained in 40 control participants and 40 schizophrenic patients revealed no significant differences in…