Positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia and linguistic performance

Selected subjects from a group of first onset schizophrenics (aged under 30 years) were taken from a previous study and placed in one of two groups depending upon whether they had exclusively positive symptoms (n = 9) or a mixture of positive and negative symptoms (n = 9). Their linguistic profiles were compared with those of a group of controls (n = 10) matched for educational attainment and parental social class. Both groups of schizophrenics had significantly lower integrity scores, suggesting that they made more syntactic and semantic errors. Those patients who presented with negative symptoms tended to have speech of lower syntactic complexity than the other two groups, although the difference just failed to reach statistical significance. It is suggested that syntactic and semantic errors are state dependent features associated with positive symptoms, whereas low syntactic complexity may be a more enduring feature associated with the presence of negative symptoms.