Linguistic rules and the perception and recall of speech by schizophrenic patients.

Abstract

The effect of linguistic rules on the perception of speech was studied in normals, non‐schizophrenic hospital patients and chronic schizophrenics. Ss heard recorded sentences and word strings in which syntactic and semantic rules were systematically varied. In an immediate recall task it was found that, though the schizophrenic group performed at a significantly lower level than the control groups in terms of the number of words correctly recalled, syntactic and semantic rules aided correct perception, retention, and recall of speech by the schizophrenic group as for the control groups. It was concluded that variability in linguistic behaviour in schizophrenic patients may be due to variability in the use of the rules of language rather than to lack of knowledge of these rules.