Referent communication disturbances in acute schizophrenia.

To test several alternative models of verbal communication in schizophrenia, 24 schizophrenic and 24 normal speakers were shown sets of colors varying in similarity and number of colors displayed. The task was to describe a designated color in each set so that a listener could pick it out. Disturbances in schizophrenic speakers were shown to occur whenever the task demanded that they edit out nondiscriminating descriptions. Thus, for highly dissimilar sets where the self-editing demands are minimal, the communication accuracy, reaction time, and utterance length of schizophrenics and normals were indistinguishable. But with increasing intraset similarity the schizophrenics' communication accuracy dropped below the normals, while their reaction time and utterance length rose more sharply. Qualitative and quantitative features of disturbed schizophrenic communication were described in terms of a perseverative-chaining model of speaker behavior in schizophrenia.