Evidence for gesture-speech mismatch detection impairments in schizophrenia

• Published in: Psychiatry research 2019-03, Vol.273, p.15-21
• Main Authors: Nagels, Arne, Kircher, Tilo, Grosvald, Michael, Steines, Miriam, Straube, Benjamin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Female; Gestures; Humans; Language; Male; Metaphor; Middle Aged; Nonverbal Communication - physiology; Nonverbal Communication - psychology; Photic Stimulation - methods; Schizophrenia - diagnosis; Schizophrenic Psychology; Semantics; Speech - physiology
• ISSN: 0165-1781; 1872-7123
• DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2018.12.107

•Mismatch detection performance was particularly impaired in patients with severe positive formal thought disorder symptomatology.•This effect was evident in the abstract semantic condition, whereas no group differences were found in the concrete condition.•Data provide new evidence for gesture-speech mismatch detection impairments in schizophrenia on a pragmatic level. Patients with schizophrenia suffer from impairments in the perception and production of gestures. The extent to which patients can access the semantic association between speech and co-verbal gestures in concrete or abstract/metaphorical meaning contexts is unknown. We investigated 1) how patients differ from controls in gesture matching performance, 2) how performance differs in the context of abstract versus concrete meaning, and 3) whether formal thought disorder (FTD) symptom severity predicts task impairment. Forty-five patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (two subgroups, “mild” and “severe”) took part in this study. Participants were presented with video clips, each showing an actor saying a sentence while producing a gesture. Sentences contained either concrete or abstract/metaphorical information, and the accompanying gesture was either semantically related or unrelated to the sentence. Participants indicated via button press whether the gesture matched the content of the verbal utterance. Both patient subgroups demonstrated reduced performance in all comparisons. A significant interaction was found between patient subgroup and sentence abstractness. Task performance was worst for patients with severe positive FTD symptomatology in the abstract condition, while there were no patient subgroup differences in the concrete condition. These data shed new light on gesture-speech mismatch detection impairments in schizophrenia.