Communication disturbances and family psychiatric history in parents of schizophrenic patients

Parents of schizophrenic patients have demonstrated subtle disturbances of thought, language, and communication. The etiologic relevance of these dist urbances is not clear. This study assessed levels of referential communicat ion disturbance in the "natural speech" of schizophrenic patients, nonschiz ophrenic parents of patients, and control subjects matched to the patients' parents and tested for associations of communication disturbances in paren ts with family history of psychosis and with schizotypy scale scores. The s peech of the patients' parents as a group contained high frequencies of ref erential failures. Those parents with first-degree family histories of psyc hosis and/or high schizotypy scale scores made more frequent referential fa ilures than the rest of the parents. Family history was particularly highly associated with failures involving language structural breakdown. The resu lts of this study suggest that referential disturbances in parents of patie nts may be related to genetic liability in the parents. However, such an ef fect does not appear to account fully for the sizable differences between p arents and controls in levels of communication disturbance.