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Do schizophrenics use linguistic rules in speech recall?
Author(s) -
Straube Eckart,
Barth Ute,
König Brigitte
Publication year - 1979
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.2044-8260.1979.tb00914.x
Subject(s) - recall , psychology , linguistics , cognitive psychology , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , natural language processing , computer science , psychiatry , philosophy
Varying degrees of organization of verbal material were presented to determine their use in sentence reproduction by acute and chronic schizophrenic subjects, a psychiatric (alcoholic) control group, and a healthy control group. The material consisted of six‐word sentences presented over earphones, with background noise of differing intensity. The main result was that schizophrenics use verbal organization as effectively as healthy and psychiatric controls when reproducing the sentences. The noise distraction influenced performance of all groups similarly. Results suggest that performance of schizophrenics is facilitated by structured material (semantic and syntactic organization). The results do not suggest that either the linguistic repertoire or the application of linguistic rules is specifically affected in schizophrenia. The flatter performance slope of schizophrenics with increasing contextual constraints, found by some researchers, is explained by the unspecific effect of task difficulty.