Verbal fluency as a measure of lexical-semantic processing in psychotic disorders and schizophrenia

We firstly introduce the notion of lexical- semantic deficits in schizophrenia and the concept of semantic fluency. We follow with a review of semantic fluency studies in schizophrenia patients. Thereafter, we present the results of two studies from our lab. In a study of semantic fluency in first-episode psychosis with schizophrenia features/symptoms, we found disproportionate deficits across different lexical-semantic categories in the patient group. In another study of on the neuropsychological background of verbal fluency in healthy Croatian speakers, we found that animal fluency is highly correlated with visual object recognition, while tree fluency is also highly correlated with cognitive flexibility and visual episodic memory.