ABSTRACT
As the present review shows, what has come to be known as schizophrenic language (SL) is not found in all individuals who are diagnosed as schizophrenic. Moreover, in those patients who do display SL, the syndrome occurs intermittently and, except in some severe cases, infrequently. Furthermore, when we talk about SL, we are talking about characteristics of spontaneous speech production; we do not know whether the syndrome has a counterpart in speech comprehension. From these observations alone, particularly the first two, one tends to conclude that SL is not a disorder of language competence (i.e., of underlying syntactic, semantic, phonological, lexical-morphological, pragmatic knowledge) but of language performance.
