Restricted associations of aphasics and schizophrenics

Matched groups (N = 25) of fluent and nonfluent aphasics, brain-damaged and normal controls as well as schizophrenics were requested to name (1) as many animals and (2) as many things that are typically yellow as possible within 5 min. The main results of Gloning & Müller (1972) as to smaller numbers of correct responses, higher percentages of repetitions, shorter association clusters, and higher popularity in aphasics could be replicated for animal task. Comparing the data from both tasks for fluent and nonfluent aphasics with the various control groups led to considerable doubts as to what extent these results follow directly from quantitative differences in verbal output or have to be interpreted as qualitative differences in memory storage, retrieval, and self-editing processes.