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The influence of context on language perception in schizophrenia
Author(s) -
Silva W. P.,
Hemsley D. R.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1977.tb00240.x
Subject(s) - immediacy , psychology , perception , stimulus (psychology) , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , context (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , psychosis , audiology , developmental psychology , psychiatry , medicine , neuroscience , paleontology , philosophy , epistemology , biology
The present experiment employed the ‘Cloze’ procedure to investigate language perception in schizophrenia. The stimulus immediacy hypothesis of Salzinger, Portnoy & Feldman (1966) predicts that with increasing context, schizophrenic performance, unlike that of normals, will fail to improve. A comparison of groups of schizophrenics and normals on such a task, with varying levels of context, not only showed that schizophrenics failed to improve with greater context but that their performance deteriorated. A comparison of acute and chronic schizophrenics indicated that the deterioration was most prominent in acute patients, the performance of chronics remaining relatively stable. An interpretation of the data in terms of narrowed attention in chronic schizophrenia appears plausible, and consistent with Broen's (1968) theory. Such an interpretation may be tested by an extension of the range of context conditions.