“How shall a discourse be understood?”

The ice cream stories: A study in normal and psychotic narrations

“…It may be argued, and has often been, that such patients produce deviant discourse because they wish to, either because they want to confound the investigator, or because they are especially creative (Chaika, 1974(Chaika, , 1977(Chaika, , 1981(Chaika, , 1982a. Alternatively, one might argue that the psychotic participants in this study failed because they did not understand what was expected of them.…”

“…Many studies have selected patients solely on the basis of diagnosis without ascertaining whether or not they were part of the subset of patients who evinced structurally deviant speech at any time. This has contributed to the dissension about whether or not schizophrenics suffer from a lapse in linguistic competence (Chaika, 1981). If one happens to be dealing with those who speak structurally normally, one can say as does Bertram Cohen (1978, p. 1), for instance, "hard instances of agrammatism" don't occur in schizophrenia, or find, as did DiSimone, Darley, and Aronson (1977), that, on an aphasia test battery, schizophrenics do not respond as aphasies do.…”

Alteraciones del Relato

“…La misma autora sostuvo, en trabajos posteriores (Chaika, 1981;, que estas características podían interpretarse como manifestaciones de tres disfunciones básicas: la tendencia a la perseveración, la falta de control sobre la selección de las unidades lingüísticas durante el proceso de producción, y la incapacidad para subordinar las decisiones léxicas a las exigencias estructurales y comunicativas impuestas por el tópico del discurso.…”

Cognitive Microgenesis

“…This resulting discourse structure is illustrated in Figure 7.1. Deese (1978) first proposed that the disorganization of schizophrenic speech can be traced to a deviation of propositional structures from a strict tree form (see also discussions by Chaika, 1981Chaika, , 1982, of the schizophrenic's failure to subordinate propositions to topic, or to adhere to a discourse macrostructure, a term from van Dijk, 1980). As a result, the processing requirements of these texts would be markedly increased for speakers, and the experience of "looseness" or incoherence would accompany encoding efforts on the part of listeners.…”