Résultat de la recherche
Context processing during irony comprehension in right-frontal brain-damaged individuals
The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the degree of incongruity between contextual information and a target sentence influences the extent to which irony is understood in individuals with right-frontal-hemisphere damage (RHD). A psycholinguistic paradigm was used, allowing us to assess whether impairment in irony understanding is likely to be due to insensitivity (i.e. difficulty in capturing or detecting relevant contextual information) to relevant contextual information or to difficulties in integrating contextual information. Twenty individuals with RHD and 20 healthy control (HC) participants were tested on their understanding of a speaker’s ironic intent and their executive functions. The main results revealed that individuals with RHD exhibit different patterns of performance, some of them being able to understand irony while in others this ability was impaired. The present study gives support to the hypothesis that difficulties in adequately using contextual information may account for pragmatic impairment of individuals with RHD. More importantly, the results suggested that these difficulties are related to a lack of sensitivity to contextual information instead of difficulty integrating it along with the ironic utterance. A subgroup of individuals with RHD processed the speaker’s utterance without any reference to contextual information, which led them to a literal interpretation of the utterance.
Do patients with schizophrenia attribute mental states in a referential communication task?
Introduction. Many studies have reported that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) may have impaired social cognition, resulting in communication disorders and theory of mind (ToM) impairments. However, the classical tasks used to assess impaired ToM ability are too complex. The aim of this study was to assess ToM ability using both a classical task and a referential communication task that reproduces a ‘‘natural’’ conversation situation.
Methods. Thirty-one participants with schizophrenia and 29 matched healthy participants were tested individually on a referential communication task and on a standard ToM task.
Results and Conclusion. The main results showed that SZ participants had difficulties using reference markers and attributing mental states in both ToM tasks. Contrary to healthy participants, they exhibited a tendency to ineffectively mark the information they used (indefinite articles for old information and/or definite articles for new information) and had problems using information they shared with the experimenter.