THE PSYCHOLINGUISTICS OF AUDITORY HALLUCINATIONS

The purpose of this study was to investigate psycholinguistic behaviou r, as language processing, verbal reasoning and discourse production, in hallucinating and non-hallucinating subjects suffering from psychot ic disorders. Nineteen hallucinating and 13 non-hallucinating subjects were assessed on a battery of tests of psycholinguistic functioning w ith complementary measures of abstraction and discourse cohesion. The experimental groups were matched with healthy controls by age, gender and education. Only a discourse score differentiated the patient group s. No tests of receptive or executive psycholinguistic functioning or abstraction distinguished the patient groups with hallucinating or non -hallucinating behaviour, thus disorders of Linguistic processing in t hese domains are not specific to patients with auditory hallucinations . The patient groups did differ from their healthy controls on tests t hat required abstract processing and reasoning. There is also some evi dence that both patient groups had difficulty with lexical retrieval o r word generation, and with memory and comprehension. The conclusions support a concept of dysfunction of the executive system that facilita tes linguistic processing in psychotic disorders. They also support fu rther investigation of a comprehension deficit in psychosis and the us e of discourse analysis as a diagnostic tool in this heterogeneous dis ease.