Language production and thought disorder in schizophrenia

The authors examined the relationship between language production (LP) processes and thought disorder. Thirty-nine schizophrenic or schizoaffective participants completed tasks measuring discourse planning, monitoring, and grammatical-phonological encoding, as well as an interview used to rate thought disorder. The authors found that different LP processes were differentially related to different thought disorder subtypes. Incompetent references were strongly and selectively related to discourse planning performance. In addition, word approximations-neologisms were strongly and specifically associated with grammatical-phonological encoding performance. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for understanding the multifaceted nature and etiology of thought disorder.