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Acute schizophrenics with either good or poor premorbid histories were compared with control groups of undergraduates and sixth-grade children on their sensitivity to syntactic structure in speech perception. They listened to strings of unconnected words, sentences with clicks embedded before, in, or after a clause break, and a passage of connected discourse that was interrupted at specific intervals after either a 1-clause or a 2-clause sentence. During designated test pauses they wrote down as many words as they could recall and indicated the location of the click in the sentences. The schizophrenics showed poor overall recall but did not differ from the control groups in the proportion of recall attributable to syntactic structure. According to Miller (1956), the human mind can handle only a limited number of discrete items at one time (the "magical number' 7 ± 2"). In order to assimilate more information, the mind "chunks" items together, recording this segment as one item to increase memory capacity. In listening to or reading verbal material, words are processed in segments which correspond to the surface structure and, although the specific wording may be lost, the general idea is retained. The advantage of such a chunking system is apparent. One normally hears verbal material only once. If a listener did not chunk, he could easily get lost in the large number of items with which he would have to deal and by losing the surface structure could also lose the underlying thought.

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