Schizophrenic performance in a word-communication task.

Speaker and listener skills in schizophrenic and in normal Ss were studied using a communication task in which the speaker provides clue words to distinguish referent from nonreferent stimuli, and the listener chooses the speaker's referent from each stimulus array on the basis of the speaker's clue words. 4 groups of 18 speaker-listener pairs were used: schizophrenic speakers-schizophrenic listeners; schizophrenic speakers-normal listeners; normal speakers-schizophrenic listeners; normal speakers-normal listeners. Analysis of accuracy scores (proportion correct referent choices) showed that schizophrenic speakers were inferior to normals (p