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Spared bottom-up but impaired top-down interactive effects during naturalistic language processing in schizophrenia: evidence from the visual-world paradigm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2018

Hugh Rabagliati Open the ORCID record for Hugh Rabagliati [Opens in a new window] ,
Nathaniel Delaney-Busch ,
Jesse Snedeker  and
Gina Kuperberg
Hugh Rabagliati*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 01238, USA School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Nathaniel Delaney-Busch
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA
Jesse Snedeker
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 01238, USA
Gina Kuperberg
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA Department of Psychiatry and the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA
*
Author for correspondence: Hugh Rabagliati, E-mail: hugh.rabagliati@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

Background

People with schizophrenia process language in unusual ways, but the causes of these abnormalities are unclear. In particular, it has proven difficult to empirically disentangle explanations based on impairments in the top-down processing of higher level information from those based on the bottom-up processing of lower level information.

Methods

To distinguish these accounts, we used visual-world eye tracking, a paradigm that measures spoken language processing during real-world interactions. Participants listened to and then acted out syntactically ambiguous spoken instructions (e.g. ‘tickle the frog with the feather’, which could either specify how to tickle a frog, or which frog to tickle). We contrasted how 24 people with schizophrenia and 24 demographically matched controls used two types of lower level information (prosody and lexical representations) and two types of higher level information (pragmatic and discourse-level representations) to resolve the ambiguous meanings of these instructions. Eye tracking allowed us to assess how participants arrived at their interpretation in real time, while recordings of participants’ actions measured how they ultimately interpreted the instructions.

Results

We found a striking dissociation in participants’ eye movements: the two groups were similarly adept at using lower level information to immediately constrain their interpretations of the instructions, but only controls showed evidence of fast top-down use of higher level information. People with schizophrenia, nonetheless, did eventually reach the same interpretations as controls.

Conclusions

These data suggest that language abnormalities in schizophrenia partially result from a failure to use higher level information in a top-down fashion, to constrain the interpretation of language as it unfolds in real time.

Keywords

Eye movementslanguagepredictionschizophreniavisual-world paradigm
Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 49 , Issue 8 , June 2019 , pp. 1335 - 1345
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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