[Speech behavior of schizophrenics. Assay of an experimental point of departure (author's transl)].

Schizophrenic subjects and a control group of healthy subjects were tested with the following three language tasks: (1) to complete interruptions in a text, (2) to compose sentences from a sample of words written on cards and (3) to associate word cards to certain concepts. Besides the correct words, so-called irrelevant words were given as distracting stimuli. The inferior performance of the acute paranoid hallucinating subjects is interpreted in the sense of disturbance of cognitive selective functions. It is assumed that the central nervous inhibition of irrelevant stimuli fails to work successfully in certain groups of schizophrenics.