Schizophrenia is a prevalent mental health disorder that creates enormous social, economic, and interpersonal hardships for patients and their families. Although hallucinations and delusions are the most salient symptoms of this disease, language abnormalities are among the most prominent cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. The proposed research will explore the processes and circuits that underlie impaired discourse comprehension in schizophrenia. Discourse comprehension deficits are likely to have important functional implications, but there has been relatively little investigation of real-time discourse processing in schizophrenia, particularly in relation to other impaired cognitive and psycho-social functioning. Previous research in schizophrenia has related cognitive deficits to impairments in the ability to control the maintenance of context representations. We will test the hypothesis that deficits in controlled integration and maintenance of discourse context in schizophrenia will lead to difficulties in discourse comprehension, but will relatively spare processing of meanings of words and sentence structures. To do so we will combine electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) measures of language comprehension with measures of cognitive, social and occupational functioning in schizophrenia. Our approach will allow us to examine whether discourse comprehension deficits in schizophrenia relate to impaired cognitive, social and occupational functioning, and the outcome of this research can be used in the development and assessment of new treatments for this disease.

Public Health Relevance

Schizophrenia is a prevalent mental health disorder that creates enormous social, economic, and interpersonal hardships for patients and their families. Language abnormalities are among the most salient cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. The proposed research will use electrophysiological measures of brain activity to explore the processes and circuits that underlie impairments in controlled integration and maintenance of discourse context in schizophrenia and the impact of such impairments on social and occupational functioning. The outcome of this research can be used in the development and assessment of new treatments for this disease.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Exploratory/Developmental Grants (R21)
Project #
1R21MH099327-01
Application #
8428067
Study Section
Adult Psychopathology and Disorders of Aging Study Section (APDA)
Program Officer
Morris, Sarah E
Project Start
2012-12-01
Project End
2014-11-30
Budget Start
2012-12-01
Budget End
2013-11-30
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2013
Total Cost
$231,000
Indirect Cost
$81,000
Name
University of California Davis
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
047120084
City
Davis
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
95618
Boudewyn, Megan A; Carter, Cameron S; Long, Debra L et al. (2017) Language context processing deficits in schizophrenia: The role of attentional engagement. Neuropsychologia 96:262-273
Traxler, Matthew J (2015) Priming of Early Closure: Evidence for the Lexical Boost during Sentence Comprehension. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:478-490
Hoversten, Liv J; Brothers, Trevor; Swaab, Tamara Y et al. (2015) Language Membership Identification Precedes Semantic Access: Suppression during Bilingual Word Recognition. J Cogn Neurosci 27:2108-16
Boudewyn, Megan A; Long, Debra L; Swaab, Tamara Y (2015) Graded expectations: Predictive processing and the adjustment of expectations during spoken language comprehension. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 15:607-24
Traxler, Matthew J (2014) Trends in syntactic parsing: anticipation, Bayesian estimation, and good-enough parsing. Trends Cogn Sci 18:605-11