Psycholinguistic study of a schizophrene's speech.

Abstract

An analysis of a schizophrene's speech using a phonological system of notation is presented here. Grouping the utterance data into phonemic and non-phonemic phonatory,. the latter in turn into the normal and occasional etc. rather than phonemic and prosodic, is shown to be more comprehensive and useful. The system aims at incorporating many fresh utterance details like stretches, response time, rate of phoneme production, tone-accent distribution and the like in an edited transcript which is also serially numbered in such a way as to help pinpoint discussion of any portion. This is shown to be a useful method of bringing out many features of psycholinguistic interest, such as the general description of a subject's phonation for comparative study, the richness and close correlation of the devices to the mood and contents, etc. It also shows that the way of using phonatory devices in active speech is more varied than our native grammatical conceptions indicate and includes illustrations of semantic incoherence and a thought-type involved at many levels characterising psychotic speech.