From the McGill University website: Psycholinguistics: studying speech processes.
Posted on April 30, 2004 11:28 AM. Filed under: language.Psychology professor Debra Titone's research is breaking ground in determining the key parts of the human brain that are involved in the relatively new field of psycholinguistics — the study of how people understand and use language. She aims to determine how the human brain processes speech by comparing language processing in non-schizophrenic and schizophrenic people. Most people use contextual clues, but many schizophrenics have difficulty with this. For example, the word "pen" has several meanings. The dominant association with this word is a writing tool, and the less frequently associated meaning is an animal enclosure. In her work, Titone has found that schizophrenics can only understand the more common usage of such multiple meaning words, regardless of the context.
Titone's latest project focuses on figurative language. Schizophrenics are generally capable of producing and understanding language very well, however figurative language poses problems. For instance, the figurative proverb, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ has both literal and idiomatic meanings. Schizophrenics always interpret this type of expression literally. As Titone further explains, "There are hundreds of different idioms, and some employ metaphors that have no plausible meaning, such as, ‘paying through the nose’." Interestingly, schizophrenics have no difficulty understanding expressions with only metaphorical meanings, but they become confused when an expression has multiple meanings. Titone has discovered that, different areas of a schizophrenic's brain are involved when processing idioms with both literal and metaphorical meanings. She plans to compare the brain activity of schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic people to determine how this processing occurs. [continue]