Schizotypal traits and their relationship to reading abilities in healthy adults

Schizotypal traits (i.e., personality characteristics that range from mild eccentricities to more pronounced schizophrenia-like perceptions, thought patterns, and behaviours) have been associated with a variety of cognitive impairments, including difficulties in language processing. Although these difficulties span several aspects of language (e.g., semantic processing, verbal fluency, visual word recognition), it is unclear whether reading abilities are also affected. Thus, the current study employed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) – Brief (Raine and Benishay, 1995) to examine how schizotypal traits impact both word-level and text-level reading skills (using a battery of standardized assessments) in a sample of healthy young adults. We found some evidence that higher schizotypal traits, specifically, increased Disorganized factor scores (reflecting aberrant thinking, communication patterns, and behaviour), were associated with reduced word-level reading abilities. However, this finding did not remain significant after correcting for multiple comparisons. Overall, our study suggests that reading may be another aspect of language affected by schizotypal traits, although additional research (with greater power) is needed to further explore and confirm this finding.