Word Associations of Schizophrenic Children

Abstract

A study of word associations in 84 normal and 16 disturbed 10- and 11-yr.-old children was made through an integration of two prior methods of word-association research: the study of pathological features of adult schizophrenic language and the study of psycholinguistic features of developmental changes in children's associations. The associations of 8 schizophrenic children and 8 non-schizophrenic children in residential treatment were compared with those of 84 normal children. The associative differences were most consistent and definitive among the schizophrenic children: they gave fewer common responses and more idiosyncratic, unrelated responses. All the children made responses termed “playing with the word,” which is a sign of association disturbance in adults but appears to be normal in children. The associative differences observed between normal and disturbed children were interpreted as not so much reflecting a “developmental lag” in associative structure as a difficulty in selection of an association from what is believed to be a normal associative repertoire. The variability in occurrence of common responses plus the appearance of the expected “paradigmatic shift” in all the children supported this interpretation.