Category fluency in Croatian-speaking patients with first-episode psychosis with schizophrenia features/symptoms (original) (raw)

Despite extensive research, the picture of lexical-semantic deficits in schizophrenia remains to be illuminated. Furthermore, research in first- episode psychosis with schizophrenia features/symptoms is lacking. By using the verbal fluency paradigm, it has recently been proposed that lexical-semantic deficits in schizophrenia might be caused by increased neural noise, resulting in stronger competition during lexical selection. The study recruited 22 first-episode psychosis (FEP) patients diagnosed with an acute schizophrenia- like psychotic disorder or acute polymorphic psychotic disorder with symptoms of schizophrenia according to ICD-10 criteria and 22 matched control subjects. Subjects were administered the category fluency task using two lexical-semantic categories: animals and trees. We hypothesized that (1) the patients would produce significantly fewer clustered words and significantly smaller clusters compared to control subjects and that (2) the patients would have a signif...