Word production in schizophrenia and its relationship to positive symptoms

We explored relationships between positive symptoms of schizophrenia and ne urocognitive functions (language and memory). The semantic and phonemic ass ociations among words produced in a verbal fluency task by 26 participants diagnosed with DSM-III-R schizophrenia were examined. Formal thought disord er was associated with producing fewer contextually related words and with producing more unrelated words. In contrast, hallucinations were associated with producing more related words. Our results suggest associations betwee n formal thought disorder and impaired memory, and between hallucinations a nd increased lexical activation/excessive synaptic pruning. (C) 1999 Publis hed by Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.