Hizkuntzaren nahasteak eskizofrenian: ehun urteko ikerlanak

Abstract

The research on the nature of schizophrenic thought and language has developed from clinical psychogenic and descriptive theories into reliable and operational measurement systems. To start with, this article reviews early approaches which maintained that the thought of people with schizophrenia was “paralogical” and that their speech was childish and often unintelligible, and the studies on “verbal behavior”, developed during the supremacy of behaviorism and strongly criticized later by the cognitive paradigm. Next, the paper examines thoroughly the psycholinguistic research carried out in the second half of the 20th century, specially the one on communication. This research revealed deficits at different levels of the speech, but particularly at the “high” levels of processing. Finally, we review the most recent studies, according to which speech of people with schizophrenia is related to at least three causal factors: a) inability to focus the attention, b) failure in the executive function, and c) random access to memories that are conveyed although they do not fit in with the context. We come to the conclusion that two things must be done in the future: to design tasks specific to investigate the early stages of the processing in this pathology (in order to explain the role
played by the purely “linguistic” processes in the language and the thought of people with schizophrenia), as well as to improve the models of natural speech production in order to give a better account of the processes carried out in the early stages of language production.