An analysis of grammatical deviance occurring in spontaneous schizophrenic speech

Abstract

It has often been claimed that schizophrenic speech reflects episodic disturbances in utilization of linguistic rules referable to dominant hemisphere dysfunction. These claims, however, have generally been argued on the basis of speech samples gleaned from single case studies. Insofar as normal speech also reflects errors of various sorts, it has been impossible, on the basis of these data, to argue that breakdowns of grammatical structure evinced by some schizophrenics necessarily reflect specific linguistic pathology. In order to more carefully determine the specificity of linguistic deviance produced by schizophrenic speakers, an analysis of spontaneous conversational speech was developed. The analysis was designed to locate and classify grammatical deviance by differentiating “normal dysfluency”, lexical selection problems, and syntactic difficulties. A measure of “severity” of syntactic deviance was generated which reflected the degree that the “target” of the manifest utterance was ambiguous. The analysis was applied blindly to transcribed speech produced by eleven schizophrenic patients and a comparison group of nine nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients. Schizophrenics produced grammatical deviance at a much greater rate than nonschizophrenics, and tended to produce more severe errors. The analysis described may be useful for quantifying and characterizing spontaneously produced paragrammatisms generated by other classes of speakers as well.