Language and schizophrenia

Disturbances of speech are one of the most obvious signs, in an acute episode, of schizophrenia.Most psychopathologists have regarded these disturbances as an indication of an underlying dis-order of thought. It was hoped, therefore, that the study of schizophrenic language would notonly provide a measure of its deviance but would also throw some light on the construct 'schizo-phrenia' itself Unfortunately. , the progress of research has been very slow due, in part, to thefact that clinically relevant data, such as other symptoms, have not been taken into account inthe design of experiments. There have been several general reviews of the literature (Pavy, 1968;Maher, 1972), so the present essay will deal chiefly with very recent work.Is the schizophrenic speaker/listener, for the most part, an adequate user of language? A fewyears ago the answer was that schizophrenics differ markedly from normals in their ability toutilize the syntactic and semantic constraints of language (Maher, 1972). This view has oftenarisen from a lack of comparison with normal speech production. For instance, Chaika (1974)based her theory of schizophrenic language on the speech errors made by schizophrenics. Thesespeech errors are, however, not unique to schizophrenics; not only are they produced by normalspeakers (Fromkin, 1975), but they are also produced by the previous personnel of the WhiteHouse (Gold, 1974).The first study to suggest that schizophrenic listeners are aware of syntactic and semanticconstraints was carried out by Gerver (1967). He showed that both schizophrenics and normalswere better at recalling semantically and syntactically correct sentences than random strings ofwords. The increase was at least as large in his chronic schizophrenic sample as it was for thenormals. Recent studies have replicated this result and extended it further, using other paradigms(Truscott, 1970; Rochester et al. 1973; Carpenter, 1976).If the formal rules of language are used properly, why are conversations with acute schizophrenicsso difficult to follow? One suggestion has been that schizophrenic speech does not contain enoughredundancy. This hypothesis has led to much fruitless research using the cloze procedure, a techniquebased on guessing deleted words from the transcripts of speech. Some researchers have shownthat schizophrenic speech is less redundant than normal, i.e. it is more difficult to guess the missingwords (Salzinger et al. 1964; Silverman, 1972). Others, however, have not shown this difference(Rutter et al. 1975, 1977, 1978). There are many possible reasons for this discrepancy, the mostlikely being differences in the way patient samples are drawn. Recently, Manschrek et al. (1979)have shown that the speech of 'thought disordered' schizophrenics was significantly less predictablethan 'non-thought disordered' schizophrenics. A non-significant difference between schizophrenicand normal samples when using the cloze technique may simply mean that there were few thoughtdisordered patients in the schizophrenic sample. A tentative conclusion from all this research isthat a lack of redundancy is not a defining feature of schizophrenic language in general, but thatit may be characteristic of the speech of those schizophrenic patients who have marked thoughtdisorder.Other variables which might characterize schizophrenic speech, such as loose associations anddisruptive clauses, have also been investigated (e.g. Siegel et al. 1976; Rochester et al. 1977), butthese variables too cannot be considered as defining features of schizophrenic speech. Rochesterand her colleagues (1977) showed that, even in the most severely thought-disordered group, thespeech of 80 % of the patients contained very few clauses that could be defined as disruptive.If the deviancy of schizophrenic language does not lie in an inability to link words together, itmust lie elsewhere. One possibility is that the speaker is violating the rules of communication