Il linguaggio verbale nel disturbo dello spettro della schizofrenia: una rassegna degli studi italiani

In the last decade, linguistics has shown a growing interest in the study of psychotic disorders, especially concerning Schizophrenia. One of the peculiarities of this mental disorder is represented by the disintegration of the psychic personality that both results in a serious alteration of the thinking process and the affective-relational dynamics and manifest itself through linguistic anomalies at the suprasegmental (e.g., monotony, idiosyncratic prosodic profiles), pragmatic (e.g., use of deictic elements, non-literal meaning comprehension) and lexical-semantic levels (e.g., repair strategies, echolalia). The aim of this paper is twofold: i) to describe the State of the Art of the studies on the oral production by Italian-speaking schizophrenic patients, and ii) to suggest how these studies could represent an excellent starting point for the construction of (psycho)linguistic models such as, for instance, shedding new light on the role played by language in the organization and cognitive integration of the somatosensory representations of the external world.