Chord perception in schizophrenia

Groups of acute schizophrenics and normal controls were presented with two tasks involving the perception of musical chords. There were no significant differences in performance due to ear of presentation (left, right or both). Taking performance over all conditions, the schizophrenic group was not significantly different from the controls on one of the two tasks although it was significantly worse on the other. These findings contrast with earlier results using a story comprehension task which suggests that the schizophrenic deficit in performance found in those studies may be specific to the processing of verbal information.