Neurolinguistics evidence of oral discourse in schizophrenic patients. Comparative analysis with Wernicke's aphasia

Abstract

Introduction: in schizophrenia, the presence of a digressive oral discourse is very frequent, plenty of paraphasias and neologisms, provoked by the alterations of thought, which is common in this illness. This form of empty oral discourse, full of paraphasias and neologisms, is one of the characteristic clinical manifestations of Wernicke's aphasia; with the difference that, in these patients, the symptomatology is linguistic, not secondary to alterations of thought. What cognitive mechanisms lead to similar verbal behaviors in both groups of patients? Objective: the purpose of this research was to obtain empirical evidence about cognitive mechanisms that underlie the alterations of verbal communication in both types of patients, from the comparative analysis of their execution in neurocognitive and neurolinguistic tests. Method: the study was implemented in a population of 70 patients organized into two groups: 35 aphasics and 35 schizophrenics. Both groups were subjected to the tests of Semantic Matching of Images, Identification of Homonymous Images and Oral Denomination of Images and Comics. Data processing involved descriptive statistics and Student's t-test for comparative analysis between groups. Results: indicate that there are no significant differences between groups in semantic processing. In the formation of lexical concepts, schizophrenics show worse performance; while aphasics perform worse on neurolinguistic examination tests. Conclusions: empirical evidence shows that the oral discourse of both groups of patients is markedly digressive and empty, with paraphasias and neologisms, but linguistically different.

Keywords

• aphasia
• schizophrenia
• oral language
• neurolinguistics
• neuropsychology