Language behaviour in acute and chronic schizophrenia.

A predicition made by Broen (1968) regarding the performance of acute and chronic non-paranoid schizophrenics on measures of dominant verbal response bias was tested in a group of 40 hospitalized schizophrenic patients. A subgroup of 10 chronic patients were found to show an abnormal dominant response bias on two different language tasks and on one task showed a bias significantly greater than that shown by a group of 10 acute patients matched on verbal IQ and rated symptomatology. A correlational analysis of the bias scores of the total sample in relation to three indices of chronicity also showed a trend in the predicted direction of a greater dominant response bias with increasing chronicity. The data are consistent with Broen's (1968) theory of dominant response bias as a learned defence against aversive response interference in acute schizophrenia.