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Verbal fluency in schizophrenia: The role of semantic clustering in category instance generation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2020

PH Robert ,
V Migneco ,
D Marmod ,
I Chaix ,
S Thauby ,
M Benoit ,
CH Beau  and
G Darcourt
PH Robert
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
V Migneco
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
D Marmod
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
I Chaix
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
S Thauby
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
M Benoit
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
CH Beau
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
G Darcourt
Affiliation:
CmDATA Memory Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France
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Summary

The aim of this study was to determine whether schizophrenic patients' impairment in semantic verbal fluency tasks is due to difficulties in organizing their search or, in other words, in organizing output in terms of clusters of meaningfully related words. Consecutive association of words belonging to subcategories of the semantic task was defined as semantic clustering. A categorical verbal fluency task was first administered to 100 healthy subjects and then to 22 schizophrenic patients and 22 healthy subjects matched for sex, age and education. In the normal population, semantic clustering was found to be involved in word generation. A large number of semantic clusters indicated efficient organization of semantic knowledge and led to better word production. Schizophrenic patients showed impaired verbal fluency and generated a smaller number of semantic clusters than the control subjects. These findings point to a defect in self-initiation of semantic categorization in schizophrenia.

Keywords

schizophreniaverbal fluencysemantic clusteringcognitive strategy
Type
Original article
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 124 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Elsevier, Paris 1997

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