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Redundancy, Repetition and Pausing in Schizophrenic Speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Gerald Silverman
Gerald Silverman*
Affiliation:
St. George's Hospital, London, S.W. 17; University Department of Psychiatry, Whiteley Wood Clinic, Woofindin Road, Sheffield S10 3TL
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Extract

It is a common clinical observation that schizophrenic subjects often exhibit abnormalities of verbal behaviour in both the spoken and the written modes. Such abnormalities may range from minor idiosyncrasy to gross linguistic deviance. Where the linguistic deviance is very obvious, this of itself may carry considerable diagnostic weight in the overall schizophrenic symptomatology. In general, two main questions have been asked concerning this phenomenon: (a) why do schizophrenics produce abnormal language?; (b) what precisely is the linguistic characteristic of the abnormality? For mainly historical reasons it has been the first question which until relatively recently has received the most attention. The past twenty years or so have seen a remarkable advance in linguistics and its vigorous hybrid, psycholinguistics, without which present attempts to analyse and quantify language deviance would have been impossible. All of this is relevant to question (b). Since the beginning of this century, however, psychodynamic models and theories have afforded sufficient frameworks for speculation over question (a).

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 122 , Issue 569 , April 1973 , pp. 407 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1973 

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