SEMANTIC PRIMING OF CATEGORY RELATIONS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Four automatic semantic priming experiments were conducted with 19 chronic schizophrenic patients and 22 normal controls. One pronunciation and 1 lexical decision priming experiment used vertically related (category subordinate-superordinate) pairs; another set of experiments used horizontally (intracategory) related pairs with pair members being typical or atypical exemplars of the category. In all experiments, schizophrenic participants showed reaction time slowing, but their semantic priming effects were not significantly different from controls. These findings provide evidence for the preservation of associative connections and automatic spread of activation in the semantic network of schizophrenic participants. In the horizontal lexical decision experiment, the priming effect for the schizophrenic group was nonsignificant, suggesting a possible abnormality in postlexical semantic matching for the intracategory pairs.