Psychotic children's free-choice selection of natural and distorted speech

The relative preferences of psychotic, language-handicapped, and linguistically normal children for natural intelligible speech or various forms of distorted speech were assessed by a two-choice operant procedure. The stimulus preferences of the psychotic group were found to be qualitatively different from those of either nonpsychotic group. The nonpsychotic children preferred natural intelligible speech in every case, although the language-handicapped children were less sensitive than the normals to the distinctions between communicative speech and unintelligible speech. In contrast, the psychotic group showed an overall preference for unnatural, distorted speech. They apparently attended primarily to the acoustic novelty of the stimuli and had little regard for linguistic intelligibility. These results suggest that speech and language may have distinctly different functional significance for these psychotic children than for normals.