Intrusions in schizophrenic speech: The immediacy hypothesis vs the lapse of attention hypothesis

Speech samples emitted by schizophrenics and individually matched normals were compared to test whether the immediacy hypothesis or the lapse-of-attention view explains the basis of schizophrenic verbal behavior more effectively. Intrusions in speech were employed as indicators of fluctuating attention, and the guessability of words deleted from speech (“cloze”) was used as a measure of general communicability. Since the inclusion or exclusion of intrusions made no difference with respect to the differential communicability of the speech of normals and schizophrenics, we concluded that the immediacy hypothesis was more consonant with the data than the lapse-of-attention view.