The study confirms the existence of differences in the speech of psychiatric patients. Low complexity appears to be a particular feature of speech in schizophrenia, even in the earliest stages of the condition. The importance of this finding is discussed in relation to two recent theories of schizophrenia: Crow's evolutionary model, and Frith's neuro-psychological model.

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The results indicate that psychiatrists can be trained to use a syntactic analysis with high levels of agreement. The BSA, which takes much less time to complete, produces measures that are comparable with the original analysis from which it was derived.

this technique can be used to study syntactic abnormalities in subjects with autism and related disorders. METHOD SubjectsThe study was conducted at the University of Michigan Developmental Disorders Clinic. Subjects with AS consisted of those who met the criteria for that disorder (ICD-10; World Health Organization [WHO], 1993). These were consecutive referrals with pervasive developmental disorders who showed evidence of autistic social dysfunction and idiosyncratic interests with a full-scale IQ of 70 or above (n = 15; 12 male; 3 female; M age:16.2 years; M full-scale IQ: 96) without evidence of language delay (phrase speech by 3 years of age). Those with a history of pragmatic deficits were not excluded. Also, none of the subjects met the criteria for autism at the time of evaluation or in the past. Subjects meeting the ICD-10 criteria were later rediagnosed according to the DSM-IV criteria (APA, 1994).Controls with high-functioning autism (HFA) were referred over the same index period. They met both the DSM-III-R (APA, 1987) and ICD-10 (WHO, 1993) criteria for autism and had a full-scale IQ over 70 (n = 13; 12 male; 1 female; M age:15.5 years; M full-scale IQ: 81.1). The groups differed significantly in their verbal IQ ( p = .026) and full-scale IQ ( p = .022) but not in their age, sex, and performance IQs. Both the groups had English as their native language and were born in the U.S. AssessmentSpeech samples (7-20 minutes) were collected during structured taped interviews and later transcribed. The interview consisted of a picture-description task, followed by a semistructured session consisting of