Schizotypal personality and semantic functioning: Revisiting category fluency effects in a subclinical sample

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychopathology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Semantic disturbances are theorized to underlie formal thought disorder in schizophrenia.
• Fluency tasks assess semantic processing but yield conflicting results regarding psychosis proneness.
• It remains unclear if these semantic disturbances manifest at subclinical levels of psychosis proneness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the association between schizotypal personality traits and semantic processing abilities.
• To determine if lexical-semantic disturbances are detectable in individuals with subclinical schizotypal traits.
• To examine the predictive role of vocabulary size on fluency task performance.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted involving written and oral category and phonological fluency tasks.
• Participants (n=148 total) completed fluency tasks and assessments of schizotypal personality and vocabulary size.
• Data analysis focused on the relationship between schizotypal traits, vocabulary, and fluency task productivity and originality.

Main Results:

• Schizotypal traits did not show a reliable association with the productivity or originality of responses in any fluency task.
• Vocabulary size significantly predicted participants' performance across all conducted fluency tasks.
• These findings challenge previous research linking schizotypy with lexical-semantic disturbances in fluency tests.

Conclusions:

• The study casts doubt on the reliability of previous findings associating schizotypy with lexical-semantic disturbances, particularly concerning productivity and originality in fluency tasks.
• Vocabulary size emerges as a significant predictor of performance in semantic and phonological fluency tasks.
• Further research is needed to clarify the relationship between subclinical psychosis proneness and semantic processing.