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The present project is a reanalysis of data used by Alpert et al. (2000) in a study comparing acoustic measures and content analysis of schizophrenic speech. Their study employed flat affect schizophrenic, non-flat affect schizophrenic, and nonclinical control groups. They found that acoustic analysis differentiated the flat affect group from non-flat affect and nonclinical samples in fluency and inflection, but that content analysis, based on the use of happy and sad word-categories, found no significant group differences.
This project examines the same data using computerized measures of Referential Activity, which assess the degree of connection between nonverbal experiences, including affect, and verbal expression (Bucci et al. 1992; Mergenthaler and Bucci 1999), and using word-lists that capture the phases of the referential process (Bucci 1997). The computerized linguistic measures were applied to the spoken language of schizophrenic and nonclinical participants using the Discourse Attribute Analysis Program, or DAAP (Maskit, Bucci, and Roussos 2002), a new computer program that produces smooth-moving weighted averages for