engleski

Metaphor production by patients with schizophrenia

There is a huge body of research on figurative language comprehension by patients with schizophrenia (resulting in a long and fixed tradition of proverb tests), and an extreme deficit in research in figurative language production by such patients. The aim of this study therefore was to investigate metaphor production by patients with schizophrenia to detect possible errors by performing qualitative analysis. We formed a target group of five patients, and a control group of five healthy individuals. Target group was balanced by the type and degree of illness. The control and target group were balanced by age, gender and education level. In order to obtain balanced and comparable materials, we have: compiled an interview based on Clinical Language Disorder Rating Scale (Chen et al. 1996), prepared pictorial material designed as a story, and we also encouraged spontaneous speech. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and annotated for: metaphor related words using MIPVU (Steen et al. 2010) ; for types and levels of metaphors using MetaNet.HR annotating schema (Despot et al. 2015) ; and for metaphorical patterns using elements of metaphor-led discourse analysis (Cameron et al. 2009). We found that percentage of mrws in the discourse produced by patients was remarkably similar to the one produced by controls. Overall, we found range of 6% to 11% of mrws in controlled speech of patients, and 7% to 10% mrws in controlled speech of the control group. Range of mrws in free speech produced by patients is from 7% to as high as 18%, even 20% in some discourse fragments. We did not find any differences in terms of idiosyncratic interpretations that would allow for characterizing any interpretation as “impaired”. These results suggest different approach to testing metaphor production ability by patients with schizophrenia, as well as using different methods to test their ability to understand figurative language.

metaphor production ; schizophrenia

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