engleski

Metaphor production by patients with schizophrenia ‒ a metaphor-led discourse analysis

Schizophrenic language concretism (the inability of patients with schizophrenia to understand figurative meaning) has long been the subject of clinical and experimental interest. It has been shown that schizophrenic patients have impaired pragmatic or context dependent language understanding (Bazin et al2000, Linscott 2004). They demonstrate two impairments of figurative language comprehension: insensitivity to irony and poor recognition of metaphor (Langdon and Coltheart 2004). Interpretational errors include literality, concretism, idiosyncratic and bizarre responses etc. (Iakimova et al. 2006). Neural basis of schizophrenic language has also been studied (Kircher et al.).All the previous research of schizophrenic language was focused on figurative language comprehension (resulting in a long and fixedtradition of proverb tests). The aim of our study is to investigate metaphor production by patients with schizophrenia to reveal cognitive processes that underlie it and to detect possible errors.We formed a target group of five patients with schizophrenia, and a control group of five healthy individuals. Target group was balanced by the type and degree of illness. Control and target group were balanced by age, gender and education level.In order to collect a corpus of spontaneous speech, we have compiled an interview, based on Clinical Language Disorder Rating Scale (Chen et al. 1996), and prepared pictorial material designed as a story. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. On these transcriptions, we have performed a qualitative analysis using method of metaphor- led discourse analysis to detect differences in patterns of metaphor use (Cameron et al. 2009) between the target and the control group. Material has also been annotated for the type of conceptual metaphor (primary, complex, entailed) using MetaNet (https://metanet.icsi.berkeley.edu/metanet/) and MetaNet.HR (http://ihjj.hr/metafore/metanet-hr/) annotating schema. Target and control group parameters were then analyzed and compared. The results of the analysis could improve proverb tests as well as schizophrenia diagnostics and therapy.

metaphor ; schizophrenia

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