Correlation of Linguistic Competence with Psychopathology

The present study was carried out to test our hypothesis that linguistic competence may importantly determine the manifest symptomatology as well as type of schizophrenia and neurosis. A test of linguistic competence constructed by us after two tryouts and consisting of eight subtests, namely colour naming, naming filial relationships and household objects, TAT (mean lengh of utterance and total number of morphenes), picture arrangement, temporal and spatial relationships, similarities and vocabulary was administered to 15 patients each of acute, paranoid and chronic schizophrenia; manic depressive psychosis; and anxiety, hysterical and obsessive compulsive neurosis. On analysis of variance, the groups differed significantly on household objects, TAT(total morphemes), temporal and spatial relationships and vocabulary. Obsessive compulsive neurotics, paranoid schizophrenics and anxiety neurotics scored highest while chronic schizophrenics and MDP scored lowest on these subtests. The study thus suggests that these illnesses may be phenomenological correlates of high and low linguistic competence, respectively.