PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tamara Y. Swaab
AU  - Megan A. Boudewyn
AU  - Debra L. Long
AU  - Steve J. Luck
AU  - Ann M. Kring
AU  - J. Daniel Ragland
AU  - Charan Ranganath
AU  - Tyler Lesh
AU  - Tara Niendam
AU  - Marjorie Solomon
AU  - George R. Mangun
AU  - Cameron S. Carter
TI  - Spared and Impaired Spoken Discourse Processing in Schizophrenia: Effects of Local and Global Language Context
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0965-13.2013
DP  - 2013 Sep 25
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 15578--15587
VI  - 33
IP  - 39
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/39/15578.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/39/15578.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2013 Sep 25; 33
AB  - Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in a broad range of cognitive functions, including impairments in the controlled maintenance of context-relevant information. In this study, we used ERPs in human subjects to examine whether impairments in the controlled maintenance of spoken discourse context in schizophrenia lead to overreliance on local associations among the meanings of individual words. Healthy controls (n = 22) and patients (n = 22) listened to short stories in which we manipulated global discourse congruence and local priming. The target word in the last sentence of each story was globally congruent or incongruent and locally associated or unassociated. ERP local association effects did not significantly differ between control participants and schizophrenia patients. However, in contrast to controls, patients only showed effects of discourse congruence when targets were primed by a word in the local context. When patients had to use discourse context in the absence of local priming, they showed impaired brain responses to the target. Our findings indicate that schizophrenia patients are impaired during discourse comprehension when demands on controlled maintenance of context are high. We further found that ERP measures of increased reliance on local priming predicted reduced social functioning, suggesting that alterations in the neural mechanisms underlying discourse comprehension have functional consequences in the illness.