During the last 20 years, a body of research has emerged suggesting that deficits
in the self-monitoring of willed intention to act may be responsible for the expression of
positive symptoms in schizophrenia (Frith, 1992). Empirical evidence supporting this
theory indicates that schizophrenics with positive symptoms are impaired on motor and
speech based tasks that involve monitoring of internal cognitive mechanisms and
behavior plans, but are less impaired when monitoring external sensory feedback. The
current project extends this research by comparing the performance of two groups of
schizophrenics (hallucinators, n=16; and nonhallucinators, n=15) with a group of nonpsychotic
psychiatric patients (n = 15) on measures of speech monitoring of internal and
overt speech. On two measures of internal speech monitoring (silent reading and
identification of speech errors in a white noise environment), the schizophrenics were
found to be impaired relative to controls; however, the schizophrenics were also impaired
on a task of self-monitoring when they had access to external feedback. Analysis of the
subgroups data (hallucinators vs. nonhallucinators) indicated very similar performances
across tests and no significant differences were identified, with the exception of the silent
reading test in which the hallucinators did perform significantly worse.
These results indicate that the speech-monitoring deficit in schizophrenia is not
limited to the internal speech plan, but can also involve a failure to monitor overt speech,
contrary to previous report. Furthermore, speech-monitoring deficits are not limited to
schizophrenics who experience hallucinations.
An additional experiment involving delayed auditory feedback (DAF) was also
conducted to replicate a previous finding in the literature that schizophrenics were more
dysfluent in DAF. On the DAF task, the combined schizophrenic group were found to be
more dysfluent than controls, and there were no differences between the two
schizophrenic subgroups. Further correlational analysis revealed a strong relationship
between the level of dysfluency in DAF and self-monitoring impairment. While the
results of the experiment were similar to those found by previous authors (Goldberg, Gold, Coppola, & Weinberger, 1997), the correlational analysis allows for an explanation of dysfluency in DAF based on self-monitoring. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/8002 |
| Date | 27 April 2017 |
| Creators | Sheer, Jeffrey Brian |
| Contributors | Mateer, Catherine A. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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