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. 2022 Dec;51(6):1371-1391.
doi: 10.1007/s10936-022-09903-6. Epub 2022 Jul 16.

Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro  1 , Giovanni de Girolamo  2 , Claudio Luzzatti  3   4 , Marco Marelli  3   4
Affiliations

Agency of Subjects and Eye Movements in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro et al. J Psycholinguist Res. 2022 Dec.

Abstract

People with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) show anomalies in language processing with respect to "who is doing what" in an action. This linguistic behavior is suggestive of an atypical representation of the formal concepts of "Agent" in the lexical representation of a verb, i.e., its thematic grid. To test this hypothesis, we administered a silent-reading task with sentences including a semantic violation of the animacy trait of the grammatical subject to 30 people with SSD and 30 healthy control participants (HCs). When the anomalous grammatical subject was the Agent of the event, a significant increase of Gaze Duration was observed in HCs, but not in SSDs. Conversely, when the anomalous subject was a Theme, SSDs displayed an increased probability of go-back movements, unlike HCs. These results are suggestive of a higher tolerability for anomalous Agents in SSD compared to the normal population. The fact that SSD participants did not show a similar tolerability for anomalous Themes rules out the issue of an attention deficit. We suggest that general communication abilities in SSD might benefit from explicit training on deep linguistic structures.

Keywords: Eye movements; Language; Schizophrenia spectrum disorders; Verb thematic roles.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Mean GD, FTD and probability of regression by group, role, and condition (bars indicate the standard error of the mean). Note *significant at α ≤ .05; ***significant at α ≤ .001
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Two-way interaction plot on TFD by Group and Condition. Note HC healthy controls, SSD schizophrenia spectrum disorders
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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