Predictability and anxiety in speech by parents of female schizophrenics.

Abstract

Reported anomalies in verbal communication by parents of schizophrenics were investigated. Content structured speech samples from IS sets of parents of good premorbid (GPM) and poor premorbid (PPM) schizophrenic daughters and nonpsychiatric controls (NPC) were obtained. These samples were analyzed by content area (neutral, aggression, dependency, and sex) for communicability, amount of speech anxiety, and source pathology. Communicativeness was assessed by cloze procedure using male and female college raters. Contrary to prediction, PPM parents tended to have the least amount of speech anxiety and the highest predictability, whereas NPC parents tended to have the highest speech anxiety and lowest predictability. However, raters tended to correctly identify which parents had the most disturbed offspring.