TITLE:
Language, executive functioning and symptomatology—Is fluency a transversal tool in schizophrenia?
AUTHORS:
Romina Rinaldi, Laurent Lefebvre, Julie Trappeniers
KEYWORDS:
Schizophrenia; Executive Functions; Symptomatology; Fluency
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Psychiatry,
Vol.3 No.4,
September
2,
2013
ABSTRACT: Despite a large number of studies on fluency disorders
in schizophrenia, it is still not clear whether executive functioning and
fluency tasks are empirically linked and how symptomatology could specifically
get involved on these influences. We carried out analyses of performances in
several verbal fluency tasks, a non-verbal fluency task and an executive test
(FAB) in 25 schizophrenics and 25 healthy subjects matched in terms demographic
data. Patients also completed the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale in order
to control for their clinical profile. Our results suggest that schizophrenic
patients show both category and letter fluency deficits with a greater
impairment for letter fluency. They also display poorer performances for the
non-verbal fluency task. In patients, all the verbal and non-verbal fluencies
are significantly correlated with the FAB total score. By contrast, in controls,
only letter fluency correlates with the FAB total score, which is congruent
with previous literature on the healthy mechanisms of verbal fluency. Besides,
factorial analyses show that symptomatology is specifically related to
particular indexes of fluency tasks. Taken together, these data lead to support
the hypothesis of retrieval rather than semantic difficulties and alargest
involvement of executive functioning in schizophrenics during tasks that
require a certain degree of efficiency, with performance being influenced by
the clinical profile. Yet, the relation between fluency scores and executive
functioning has to be more intensively explored and further studies should
include semantic memory measures that fit with pathology’s constraints and
characteristics.