Can the psychiatrist learn from the psycholinguist? Detecting coherence in the disordered speech of manics and schizophrenics.

In general, linguistic analyses have not proved useful to psychiatrists because of their complexity and their inability to differentiate between diagnostic groups. However, cohesion analyses of disordered speech seem to offer both a simple and potentially useful tool for clinical diagnosis. This study was designed to test whether psychiatrists can use the rudiments of this analysis in order to differentiate between two diagnostic groups, manics and schizophrenics.