Loading...
Speech and thought disturbances and the resulting communication failures are hallmarks of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is also associated with impairments in attention and sequencing abilities. These investigators analyzed speech samples from 39 inpatients with schizophrenia and 36 healthy comparison subjects to examine the degree to which schizophrenia patients’ impairments in attention or in simple, complex, and conceptual sequencing were associated with structural and nonstructural communication failures.
Structural communication failures occur when the meaning of an utterance is unclear to listeners because of faulty relationships between different clauses or segments of speech — e.g., confused or missing referents, ambiguous words, and …