Volume 10, Issue 1 (Spring 2008)                   Advances in Cognitive Sciences 2008, 10(1): 11-20 | Back to browse issues page

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Abstract:   (2849 Views)
Objective: This study was carried out to examine some aspects of fluency in individuals with schizophrenia and to compare them with normal subjects, aiming at presenting stable symptoms of language and speech disorders and their severity; to provide more precise language-speech tests and to identify pathological aspects of speech and language. 
Method: In this cross sectional-analytic study, two groups of 22 individuals with schizophrenia and normal subjects (17 males and 5 females in each group) were interviewed using the spontaneous speech part of Persian Aphasia Test. All answers were analyzed with respect to speech fluency characteristics (filled and unfilled pauses, aberrant repetitions and percentage of spontaneous corrections). Data were analyzed using SPSS 11.5. 
Results: The normal and patient groups did not differ in the mean percentage of filled and unfilled pauses. But the mean percentage of aberrant repetition and spontaneous correction (p=0.001 and p<0.001 respectively) were significantly different. In discriminating subtests for filled and unfilled pauses, regarding grammatical and semantic borders, significant statistical difference was only seen in the group with schizophrenia. In patients, the percentage of filled pause before semantic morphemes in relation to grammatical morphemes (p<0.01), the percentage of filled pauses in the beginning of the sentence before conceptual morphemes relative to grammatical morphemes (p<0.05), and the percentage of unfilled pauses in the beginning and the middle of sentence and also before one conceptual morpheme relative to grammatical morpheme (p<0.001) were significant. 
Conclusion: The small sample size and the use of factors dependent on texture might account for the lack of significant difference in factors such as pause. However, the presence of significant differences in factors relatively independent from the effects of texture (e.g. aberrant repetition), could support other researchers' results indicating impairment of language fluency in individuals with schizophrenia and a possible neurological pathology.
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Subject: Special
Received: 2007/10/13 | Accepted: 2008/01/18 | Published: 2008/03/20

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