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Can the psychiatrist learn from the psycholinguist? Detecting coherence in the disordered speech of manics and schizophrenics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Til Wykes*
Affiliation:
MRC Social Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, London
*
1Address for correspondence: Dr Til Wykes, MRC Social Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AF.

Synopsis

In general, linguistic analyses have not proved useful to psychiatrists because of their complexity and their inability to differentiate between diagnostic groups. However, cohesion analyses of disordered speech seem to offer both a simple and potentially useful tool for clinical diagnosis. This study was designed to test whether psychiatrists can use the rudiments of this analysis in order to differentiate between two diagnostic groups, manics and schizophrenics.

Type
Brief Communication
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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