Scaling and clustering in the study of semantic disruptions in patients with schizophrenia: a re-evaluation.

Some recent studies of semantics in schizophrenia have employed multidimensional scaling and clustering techniques to analyse verbal fluency and triadic comparison data. The conclusions have been: (i) patients generate fewer words in fluency tasks and display more variable similarity groupings of words in triadic tasks, and (ii) this is due to deficits in semantics. We analysed data from both tasks. On the verbal fluency task, patients produced significantly fewer responses than controls. The results also showed little patient-specific inter-individual consistency. Similarly, for triadic comparison data, we did not find much patient-specific inter-individual consistency. When correlating patients' results at different measurement times with means of controls, the data of individual patients (at either of the two measurement times) were not predicted better from their data at the other measurement time than from controls. This latter finding suggests little patient-specific intra-individual consistency and, thus, pleads against idiosyncratic semantic deficits. Our findings do not refute the hypothesis that schizophrenia is associated with semantic disruptions. However, our results demonstrate that because of severe statistical restrictions and requirements associated with some scaling and clustering techniques, these methods may not be as useful in this enterprise as previously thought.