[Some linguistic aspects of thought disorder in non-acute schizophrenia]

Seventy texts, which had been produced spontaneously but in standardized contexts by (non-acute) schizophrenic patients and by non-schizophrenic subjects, were analysed linguistically in order to investigate the various strategies that speakers may use to join different sentences together to form a unified structure by semantic and lexicogrammatical ties. For this purpose we used Halliday's and Hasan's classification of so-called "cohesive ties". This theoretical framework makes it possible to describe the inner coherence of linguistic texts in a quantitative way. In the "schizophrenic texts" the sentences contained significantly fewer such cohesive ties than in those texts produced by normal speakers. An additional longitudinal analysis revealed an increase in the number of cohesive ties per sentence, when the same schizophrenic speakers were asked to produce a second text (in a similar context) after participating in a 3-month psychotherapy programme. The central goal of psychotherapy was to improve the patients' cognitive ability to face and cope with social stress situations. The results of several textual and statistical procedures are discussed, mainly under the aspect of cognitive dysfunctions during periods of non-acute schizophrenia.