Sentence processing in schizophrenic listeners.

Abstract

Forty hospitalized schizophrenics and 40 volunteers from the community listened to sentences in which a click was embedded. Half of the schizophrenic subjects and half of the normal subjects were asked to reproduce the sentences and indicate precisely where the click occurred. The remaining subjects were given the previously heard sentences and asked to recognize the click locations. Results showed that schizophrenic subjects tend to be less accurate than normal subjects in locating the clicks. However, this inferior performance was not due to an inability to use syntactic rules. Rather, the pattern of errors demonstrated that schizophrenic subjects distinguish between sentences which are acoustically identical but syntactically distinct, and that this distinction is maintained under response conditions with varying emphases on sentence retrieval. It is concluded that schizophrenic subjects appear to use syntax as a basis for sentence processing at least to the same extent as normal subjects do.