The Speech of a Schizophrenic Child from Two to Six

The language development of a schizophrenic child was systematically observed from ages two to six. While the child attained increasing intelligibility and a normal score on a test of language development, finer analysis revealed a severe impairment of communicativeness. The changing relationship between the amounts of echoing and context disturbance in this child's noncommunicative speech indicates that speech can serve as a revealing index of pathology. His communicative speech was marked by rigidity and only limited use of tenses and transformations. The authors believe these rigidities are related to structural defects in integration and identification.