Pragmatic Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Metaphor and Irony

Many schizophrenic patients are reported to have impaired theory-of-mind (ToM) and/or formal thought disorder and as these terms will be referred to throughout the research it is important to briefly clarify their meanings. The ability to make appropriate inferences about other people's thoughts when the objective facts do not allow these thoughts to be directly understood is referred to as theory-of-mind (ToM) (Langdon and Coltheart 2004). 'Formal thought disorder refers to a set of interrelated language phenomena... that are construed as indicating that the form of underlying information processing is disorganized' (Linscott 2004: 2)