Specific linguistic and pragmatic deficits in Italian patients with schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: Verbal communication impairments are prominent features of schizophrenia. The grammatical and pragmatic components of expressive and receptive verbal abilities were systematically examined, for the first time, in Italian patients with schizophrenia. Indeed, most of the language literature is composed of studies on English speaking people. METHOD: Elicited narrative production, and syntactic and pragmatic receptive abilities were analyzed in a cohort of 37 patients with schizophrenia and 37 healthy controls. Furthermore, a conversational speech production task was administered to an age- and gender-matched subset of this population. The level of significance was set at p