LANGUAGE PRODUCTION AND THOUGHT-DISORDER IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

The authors examined the relationship between language production (LP) processes and thought disorder. Thirty-nine schizophrenic or schizoaf fective participants completed tasks measuring discourse planning, mon itoring, and grammatical-phonological encoding, as well as an intervie w used to rate thought disorder. The authors found that different LP p rocesses were differentially related to different thought disorder sub types. Incompetent references were strongly and selectively related to discourse planning performance. In addition, word approximations-neol ogisms were strongly and specifically associated with grammatical-phon ological encoding performance. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for understanding the multifacet ed nature and etiology of thought disorder.