[Comprehension of metaphoric speech by healthy probands and schizophrenic patients. An experimental psychopathologic contribution to concretism]

Abstract

The comprehension of auditorily presented sentences with a metaphoric content was investigated in three experimental studies. Experiments 1 and 2 established the time course in control subjects: At 400 ms after prime offset only the concrete meaning was activated, whereas 1200 ms after prime offset both concrete and metaphoric meaning were active. Experiment 3 demonstrated a heightened activation of the concrete meaning and no activation of the metaphoric meaning in schizophrenic patients. These results resolve the dispute over the use of concepts by schizophrenic patients (overinclusive versus underinclusive), and can be related to the neurobiology of working memory and of associative semantic memory. The three experiments may serve as paradigms of how the method of mental chronometry can be applied in the field of psychopathology.