Effects of Perphenazine on Verbal Behavior Patterns

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of a method of assessing the subjective and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs in the human subject through the psycholinguistic analysis of short samples of the subject’s speech.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the efficacy of a method of assessing the subjective and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs in the human subject. The method involves the psycholinguistic analysis of short samples of the subject's speech. Method and Procedure A brief summary of our method of eliciting and analyzing verbal productions will be given here; details of our method are available elsewhere.4-6 Subjects are asked by the observer to talk about any interesting or dramatic personal life experience for a five-minute period, during which time the observer indicates he will not reply to any questions until the time period is over. The verbalizations are recorded on a tape recorder, and the material is transcribed by a secretary. The typed copy is the only material that is analyzed. The verbal analysis includes an analysis at the level of word types, according to a grammatical