Abstract
Schizophrenia is a kind of serious mental disease, which may cause major impairment in patients’ social-cognitive ability. It has been found that pragmatic ability in schizophrenic patients is often impaired, especially for figurative language comprehension. Figurative language refers to irony, metaphor, idiom and the like. People with schizophrenia tend to interpret figurative language as its literal meaning, which is called schizophrenic concretism. By reviewing extant literature, we found that the literature concerning this topic mainly consists of two parts: behavioral studies and brain-imaging studies. The behavioral studies mainly explore how clinical factors and cognitive ability have an impact on figurative language comprehension. Brain-imaging studies mainly discuss hemisphere lateralization in schizophrenia and whether theory of mind network in schizophrenic patients is different from that of normal groups. We conclude that future research should further explore the relationship among figurative language comprehension, cognitive ability and clinical factors, and also reveal related neural mechanism.
Highlights
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disease which is among one of the ten most damaging diseases (Vos et al, 2015)
It is known that there are more than 20 million schizophrenic patients (SPs) in the world, and 1% of the population in the world suffer from schizophrenia (Sela, Lavidor, & Mitchell, 2015)
Based on the relationship between source concept and target concept, researchers divide metaphor into two kinds: novel metaphor and conventional metaphor. They believed that conventional metaphor was understood as literal language, which was processed automatically by semantic memory, while novel metaphor was processed in a controlled way and had higher demand for cognitive ability (Bowdle & Gentner, 2005; Jahshan & Sergi, 2007; Mashal & Kasirer, 2011)
Summary
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disease which is among one of the ten most damaging diseases (Vos et al, 2015). Sacco et al (2008) designed Assessment Battery of Communication (ABACO), and it has been used to test schizophrenic patients’ pragmatic ability. The study of FLC in schizophrenic patients helps to explore the neural basis of pragmatic ability. Neural studies on figurative language tend to explore the activation of ToM neural network and its function. For schizophrenic patients, their abnormal activation pattern in FLC has been heatedly discussed (Akimoto, Miyazawa, & Muramoto, 2012; Uchiyama et al, 2012). This article will discuss schizophrenic patients’ comprehension of irony, metaphor and idioms, and explore neural basis of figurative language in terms of lateralization and neural mechanism of ToM
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