Psycholinguistics of schizophrenic language

Synopsis Cloze procedures using fifth and fourth word deletions were compared for schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic speech transcripts. Both methods distinguished between the schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic speech. Fourth word deletion gave lower scores overall and this effect was significantly greater for the more disorganized schizophrenic speech. An encoding deficit involving inappropriate repetition is discussed as a possible explanation for the findings.