THE PRODUCTION OF SIMPLE SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Fifty patients with schizophrenia according to DSM-IV criteria have been included in the study and compared to fifty healthy subjects matched for age, sex and education level with the patients. [...]of the statistical and linguistic analyses, significant differences have been observed between simple sentence types' of patients with schizophrenia and healthy subjects'. The language deficits of schizophrenia patients have long been regarded as a diagnostic indicator of the disorder which is a chronic and severe mental disorder that interferes with a person's ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions and relate to others. Patients with schizophrenia have problems in distinguishing between verbalized thought and external speech (verbal auditory hallucinations), in perceiving and interpreting the world (delusions), in social interactions and motivation (negative symptoms), and in expressing thought through language (thought disorder) (I$ik, 2006, Sadock and Sadock, 2007). [...]of language and thought disorders, patients with schizophrenia show impaired abstract thinking and these deficits in abstract thinking cause them to run into substantial difficulties in social interactions during daily life and work life. [...]demands for integrating semantic with syntactic information are often maximal at points of syntactic complexity (Ferreira, 2003; Traxler et al., 2002) and ambiguity (MacDonald et al., 1994; Tanenhaus et al., 1995). [...]it is possible that an impairment in combining syntactic and semantic information to build up context is characteristic of schizophrenia as a whole and that thought disorder manifests clinically only when this integration breaks down entirely such that language processing becomes dominated by semantic associations between individual...