Psycholinguistic aspects of pauses and temporal patterns in schizophrenic speech.

Schizophrenic speech was investigated at the moment of reading aloud paragraph-long stories and retelling them. Twenty white schizophrenic patients, with at least a high school diploma, were matched with 20 normals on the basis of race, educational level, sex, and age. Silent pauses (duration, frequency, and location), utterances (duration and syllable lengths, speech and articulation rates), and spoken hesitations (frequency and syllable lengths) were measured. When the semantic content of the stories did not agree with commonly held presuppositions, the speech characteristics of normals were analogues of the schizophrenic thought disorder.