Language Generation in Schizophrenia and Mania: The Relationships Among Verbosity, Syntactic Complexity, and Pausing

We examined the relationships among verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing in the speech of 21 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev.) (DSM-III-R) diagnosed schizophrenic participants and 19 DSM-III-R diagnosed manic participants. We found that less verbosity was associated with both less syntactic complexity and greater pausing. In addition, less syntactic complexity was associated with greater pausing. The strength of these associations did not differ significantly between the two diagnostic groups. We propose that deficits in verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing are all related to a disturbance in message generation. We discuss the consistency of this hypothesis with previous research linking information processing and frontal lobe deficits to disturbances in verbosity, syntactic complexity, and pausing.