Schizophrenia is one of the most incapacitating mental disorders. Although this disorder has been existing for long time, its exact causes are mainly unkown to us. A way to understand the illness is to investigate the potential cognitive deficits. Semantic processing deficit has been suggested to be a core impairment in patients with schizophrenia. However, the underlying mechanism is unclear. Based on the findings from previous studies, including ours, we suggested a dysfunctional working memory contributed to the semantic deficits observed in patients with schizophrenia. Four studies were designed to test this hyposthes. The first study focused on whether Chinese patients with schizophrenia had similar semantic deficits with patients in alphabetic languages, based on the theoretical model of two-stage semantic processing. Considering the remarkable differences between Chinese language and alphabetic languages, it is valuable to do so. In the second study, patients and healthy controls performed a semantic priming task under two working memory loads separately. In the third study, we investigated whether increasing working memory load would decrease semantic priming effects in large-sample healthy controls. In the last study, we examined whether semantic priming effects were stable for healthy population, and w
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