INFLUENCE OF DISTRACTION ON THE REPRODUCTION OF SPOKEN WORDS BY SCHIZOPHRENICS

Twenty-six schizophrenic and 26 nonschizophrenic patients with normal hearing acuity were presented with 140 words with instructions to repeat each word as rapidly as possible. Twenty words were presented in each of seven treatment conditionstwo with no extraneous distraction, two with no sound distraction but instructions for selective performance, and three with sound distractionwhite noise, alternating paired tones, backward speech. In each treatment, the volume of the distracting sound was increased from 50 to 80 db SPL in increments of 10 db each five words. The responses were scored independently by four judges who did not know whether a subject was schizophrenic or not. A reproduction that was clearly a different word from the stimulus was considered a failure. Schizophrenics failed to reproduce stimulus words at a significantly higher rate than did nonschizophrenics under every condition, and, with the exception of backward speech, neither the nature nor the level of distraction caused significant changes in performance in either group. There was no evidence of drifting attention by the schizophrenics; they followed instructions requiring selective performance as well as nonschizophrenics, and their short term recall was also just as good.