Irony comprehension in schizophrenia

Abstract

One of the deficits associated with schizophrenia is the language disorder. While classic analyses of the problem have focused on the traditional linguistic levels (Chaika 1974; Covington et al. 2005), schizophrenic patients have been demonstrated to exhibit deficits in comprehending nonliteral forms of discourse (Brüne and Bodenstein 2004; Sponheim et al. 2003; Rapp et al. 2008). The aim of the present study is to analyse irony comprehension in paranoid schizophrenia. Ten male patients were asked to choose the most appropriate interpretations of ironic and literal scenarios. They chose literal paraphrases significantly more often than a matched control group, which points to the existence of a figurative language comprehension deficit in schizophrenia.