ABSTRACT
The production of jumbled and disorganized speech has been described and discussed right from the earliest clinical descriptions of psychotic illnesses. The importance placed on productive speech abnormalities in the diagnosis of schizophrenia has varied over the last 100 years, but these phenomena have continued to be researched throughout (McKenna and Oh 2005). Early attempts to elucidate the structures in the brain that were related to thought disorder were based on the examination of post-mortem brains, but these efforts were inconclusive. Since the development of techniques that can image brain structure and activity in life, there has been a surge of interest in looking at the neural correlates of thought disorder. In addition, over the last ten years it has become clear that higher levels of thought disorder, alone and in combination with other disorganization symptoms, contribute to a poorer outcome in schizophrenia (Bowie and Harvey 2008; Ventura et al. 2010) and therefore are of great interest in attempting to understand how this aspect of schizophrenia impacts on daily life.
