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Auditory hallucinations and the language disorder in schizophrenic patients
Author(s) -
NHCSS SARAH KRAMER
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-6984.1995.tb01744.x
Subject(s) - psychology , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , thought disorder , language disorder , communication disorder , discourse analysis , cognitive psychology , diagnosis of schizophrenia , spoken language , interim , narrative , psychosis , linguistics , psychotherapist , cognition , psychiatry , archaeology , history , philosophy
The paper describes the language disorder in patients with schizophrenia by analysing natural language samples according to a theoretical model of discourse analysis. This is followed by an outline of a proposed therapy programme. The above constitutes part of a PhD study in progress. Patients with schizophrenia frequently present with ‘incoherent’ and ‘bizarre’ speech, leading to difficulties in communicating with other people. The language disorder has been described as including deficits such as reduced syntactic complexity (Morrice & Ingram, 1982; Fraser et al., 1986) and reduced numbers of ideas for the number of words spoken (Allen, 1983), but its exact nature remains elusive. Discourse analysis allows the determination of where language processing breaks down for purposes of assessment and diagnosis. This enables hypothesis‐driven therapy to target the exact level of difficulty that the subjects experience in their discourse (Lesser & Milroy, 1993). This also offers the ***possibiity of therapy evaluation studies. They could form a valuable addition to the presently small amount of evidence providing empirical support for clinical observations of the value of language therapy in schizophrenia (Gravell & France, 1991). Procedural, narrative and conversational discourse samples are currently being obtained from 12 patients with schizophrenia within the same total environment. A clinically usable prototype for discourse analysis will be presented. The application of this prototype will be discussed and interim results will be presented.