Melika Rajabzadeh - Rehabilitation Research Center, Department of Speech Therapy, Iran University of Medical Science.Tehran,Iran
Davood Sobhani-Rad - Department of Speech Therapy,School of Paramedical Sciences,Mashhad University of Medical Sciences
Reihaneh Saber Moghadam - Paramedical Research Center,Department of Speech Therapy,Iran,Tehran
Zahra Ghorban Nezhad - BSC in speech therapy,Mashhad University of Medical Science,Mashhad,Iran
Faezeh Mojarrad - BSC in speech therapy,Mashhad University of Medical Science,Mashhad,Iran

Background and Aim : : Schizophrenia is a cognitive-communicative disease. A person with schizophrenia has problems with personal communication that pragmatic is one of the most important aspects of communication. Studies have so far shown that language impairment is considered a diagnostic indicator of schizophrenia. Literature has shown that language impairment is contributed to non-linguistic factors, such as intellectual disabilities or deficits in information processing. Neuropsychological and neuroanatomical studies of right hemisphere function suggest that pragmatic skills, such as paralinguistic processing, may be impaired in people with schizophrenia. Due to the high prevalence of schizophrenia and the lack of research in the area of pragmatic, our study aimed to investigate the pragmatic skills in non-verbal and paralinguistic aspects of schizophrenic adults through the pragmatic adult profile (APP) and also the effect of improving pragmatic skills in communication.Methods : The current cross-sectional study was conducted on 43 individuals with schizophrenia and 43 healthy control subjects aged 18-60 years old. Inclusion criteria were diagnosis of schizophrenia by a psychiatrist, absence of other progressive diseases and substance abuse. Adult s pragmatic profile (APP) was used to assess the paralinguistic and nonverbal aspects of pragmatic skills. It evaluates the nonverbal aspects of the six components (Physical contact and proximity, body movements, facial expressions, eye contact, gesture) and the paralinguistic aspect of the five components (intelligibility, vocal intensity, pitch, prosody, and fluency of speech). Descriptive analysis (mean ± SD) was done. The scores obtained in linguistic and nonverbal variables were compared using an independent T-test with significance level of <0.05.Results : : Participants whit schizophrenia scored lower on nonverbal (mean ± SD 5/00 ± 1/09) and paralinguistic (mean ± SD 5/06 ± 3/97) aspects than the control (nonverbal: mean ± SD = 96/11 ± 14/89; paralinguistic: mean ± SD= 86/51 ± 28/16) group. In both nonverbal and paralinguistic they showed significantly poorer skills. Paralinguistic and nonverbal scores were significantly different (paralinguistic: t=40.00, P<0.0001; nonverbal: t=19.08, P<0.0001) in patients with schizophrenia from control group.Conclusion : In this study, we found that deficits in nonverbal and paralinguistic aspects of the patients showed that their performance in the pragmatic skills was poor. Pragmatic deficits lead to communication deficits in schizophrenia patients. And these flaws occur. And these flaws occur during the conversation. This study suggests the necessity of implementing pragmatic programs for people with schizophrenia to prevent recurrence of injuries and improve communication skills to reduce dependence on their daily activities.

Schizophrenia, Pragmatic, Communication