SEMANTIC AND PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

This study of 70 schizophrenic patients used a lexical decision task i nvolving the recognition of words that were preceded (primed) either b y meaningfully or phonologically associated or by nonassociated words to study the intrusion of contextually inappropriate associations in t hought disorder (TD). The patients were split into subgroups of TD and non-TD patients, and the data from these two groups were compared wit h data from 44 normal control participants. TD schizophrenic patients exhibited more semantic priming than non-TD patients and controls, and differences in phonological priming dependent on stimulus onset async hrony (SOA) were obtained. Results support the hypotheses of an increa se in activation or a decrease in inhibition in the spreading of seman tic and phonological associations in TD schizophrenic patients.