AT ISSUE - SPEECH FLUENCY AND SCHIZOPHRENIC NEGATIVE SIGNS

The spontaneous speech of negative-syndrome schizophrenia patients is underproductive and contains many hesitations and pauses, Acoustic ana lysis of the patient's speech during interview reveals that the durati on of pauses, independent of other linguistic or paralinguistic measur es, correlates strongly with the clinician's impressions of the patien t's flat affect and alogia, Pausing is less related to asociality and other aspects of the negative syndrome, The hesitations appear to refl ect a word-finding difficulty that, together with neuropsychological e vidence of compromised performance on word fluency tasks, suggests a s pecific speech generation difficulty, The significant relationship bet ween pausing and both flat affect and alogia suggests that the two neg ative signs share phenomenal and psychometric properties, The examinat ion of speech generation mechanisms may provide an informative avenue for study of schizophrenic psychopathology, Acoustic analysis reveals processes that are not apparent to the clinician and may provide a use ful basis for clinical assessments and research.