Say What?

Listen long enough to a schizophrenic talk and chances are good you will hear some strange speech. For this reason, many psychiatrists and other researchers have long suspected that schizophrenia is somehow related to a language disorder.

That ain't necessarily so, say two Dartmouth professors. They say the problem may lie not with the patients but with the doctors. Linguistic anthropology professor Hoyt Alverson and Dartmouth Medical School psychiatry professor Stanley Rosenberg contend that the doctor-patient setting is itself a kind of deviant situation that can skew anyone's way of communicating.

In fact, Rosenberg and Alverson suspect that schizophrenics actually converse quite like everyone else, and they set out to prove their hypothesis by comparing patients with college students. With the help of several Dartmouth undergraduates, the two researchers examined the structure and style of informal conversations among two groups—a small set of chronic, thought-disordered schizophrenics in a British hospital, and a similar-sized group of American undergraduates. After spending months analyzing grammar and the various ways speakers move conversations along—including all the ohs, ahs, yeahs, I means, and other "discourse markers" that round out speech—the scientists are seeing little difference between schizophrenic and student conversations. "Schizophrenics' discourse is much more like that of normals than has previously been thought," says Alverson.

What they say, however, is another matter. "Schizo- phrenics speak coherently, but they do talk at times about bizarre things," Alverson says. "They also seem to presume or feign be lief that their audience is familiar with these bizarre beliefs, when in fact it's noting." Yet, he notes, even this doesn't suggest that schizophrenics use language dif- ferently from other people—or that schizophrenics have the kind of neural deficit neuroscientists have been seeking in the left brain.

Oh, and about those odd things schizophrenics come out with: "Bizarreness is the hearer's problem," says Alverson, "not the speaker's."

Ivey, Dweck, and theWhite Guy.