Global and Local Syntactic and Semantic Language Processing

Schizophrenia is a prevalent mental health disorder that creates enormous social, economic, and interpersonal hardships for patients and their families. Although hallucinations and delusions are the most salient symptoms of this disease, language abnormalities are among the most prominent cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. The goal of this project is to study the processes and circuits that underlie impaired discourse comprehension in schizophrenia. We examine whether deficits in controlled integration and maintenance of discourse context in schizophrenia lead to impairments in discourse comprehension, but relatively spared processing of word meanings and sentence structures. To do so we combine electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) measures of language comprehension with measures of cognitive, social and occupational functioning in schizophrenia. This approach allows us to examine whether discourse comprehension deficits in schizophrenia relate to impaired cognitive, social and occupational functioning, and the outcome of this research will be used in the development and assessment of new treatments for this disease.

Principal Investigators: Tamara Swaab, Ph.D., Cameron Carter, M.D., George R. Mangun, Ph.D., Debra Long, Ph.D., Matthew Traxler, Ph.D.

Personnel: Megan Boudewyn, Ph.D., Tyler Lesh, Ph.D.