Double-decision lexical tasks in thought-disordered schizophrenic patients: a path towards cognitive remediation?

It has been shown that schizophrenics have certain difficulties in the processing of semantic context. These difficulties have usually been evaluated using lexical decision tasks with semantic priming. In this study, we chose to examine the idea of an abnormality in the early stages of semantic context processing in thought-disordered schizophrenics using two double lexical decision tasks: one with a high (25%) and one with a low (15%) proportion of related words to assess the participants' competency in controlled and possibly also more automatic context processing. The results obtained in 40 control participants and 40 schizophrenic patients revealed no significant differences in the amplitude of semantic priming between the two groups. These results suggest that, in the disorganized schizophrenic subjects evaluated in this study, the context processing processes mobilized by the employed tasks were unimpaired.