Thought-process disorder in schizophrenia: The listener's task

Results show that clinically diagnosed samples of thought-disordered speech can be reliably distinguished from samples of both non-thought- Disordered schizophrenic speech and normal utterances on the basis of lay judges' evaluations of coherence in transcripts and linguistic variables measuring coherence.

Abstract

The task which the thought-disordered speaker poses for listeners was investigated using psycholinguistic and linguistic measures of interviews. Results show that clinically diagnosed samples of thought-disordered speech can be reliably distinguished from samples of both non-thought-disordered schizophrenic speech and normal utterances on the basis of (a) lay judges' evaluations of coherence in transcripts and (b) linguistic variables measuring coherence. The linguistic measures which best predict judges' evaluations indicate that, in thought-disordered samples, the speaker makes the listener's task difficult (a) by asking the listener to search for information which is never clearly given and (b) by providing relatively few conjunctive links between clauses.