A method to study language deviation as an aspect of ego organization in young schizophrenic children.

Language holds a unique position among the functions of the ego because its development and operation depend upon the synthesis of mental schematization, motor control, affective responses, and environmental stimulation. Moreover, language is a structural organization like the ego itself, and may be studied effectively through the vehicle of speech. Thus, it may be said that speech offers a window to ego organization and higher integrative functions subsumed under the central nervous system. The developing deviant speech of schizophrenic children provides an opportunity to observe and measure one aspect of the integrative defect or fragmentation of the ego in this disorder. Deviations in language were a prominent part of the earliest clinical descriptions of childhood schizophrenia and early infantile autism (Lutz, 1937; Despert, 1938; Bradley, 1941; Kanner, 1943; Bender, 1947). Some schizophrenic children have such grossly reo