[Executive control of language production in schizophrenia: a pilot neuropsychological study]

To test the general hypothesis about executive deficits in language production in schizophrenia as well as more specific hypothesis that this deficit would be more pronounced in the case of higher demand on executive functions.

Twenty-five patients with schizophrenia and twenty-seven healthy controls were asked to tell a story based on a series of pictures and then to give an oral composition on the given topic.

Schizophrenia patients, compared to controls, demonstrated poorer programming as well as shorter text and phrase length in both tasks. Oral composition on the given topic in patients was characterized by the presence of agrammatism, need for leading questions due to the difficulties of story plot generation as well as higher variance in syntactic complexity and text length. Therefore, the authors revealed executive deficit in language production, more pronounced in the task with less numerous external cues for planning and sequential text explication, in schizophrenia patients.