Schizophrenic Speech : a Factor-Analytic Approach

Verbal responses were obtained to two questions from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Comprehension Sub-test from three groups of subjects matched for age and verbal I.Q.: schizoprhenic patients, non-schizophrenic psychiatric hospital patients, normal controls. These responses were rated by 11 graduate clinical psychology students on 15 four point scales based mainly on adjectives used in the psychiatric literature to describe " schizophrenic language ". Varimax rotations of principal components analyses of the ratings revealed two main factors accounting for approximately 93% of the total variance for all ratings: a structural (syntactic) factor and a semantic factor. This finding is discussed in terms of its implications for diagnosis and for the clinical description of the language of schizophrenics.