The language of schizophrenia: an analysis of micro and macrolinguistic abilities and their neuropsychological correlates.

Language disturbance is one of the main diagnostic features in schizophrenia and abnormalities of brain language areas have been consistently found in schizophrenic patients. The main aim of this study was to describe the impairment of micro and macrolinguistic abilities in a group of twenty-nine schizophrenic patients during the phase of illness stability compared to forty-eight healthy participants matched for age, gender and educational level. Microlinguistic abilities refer to lexical and morpho-syntactic skills, whereas macrolinguistic abilities relate to pragmatic and discourse level processing.