Statistical Parameters in Pathological Text.

Some results obtained from quantitative analysis of the texts produced by six Russian schizophrenic patients was analyzed. The analysis shows that there exists some statistical parameters which reflect two major types of verbal-mental disorders. In the first case, an obsession reorders the patient's verbal-mental activity. Consequently, the text is tilled mainly with words and word combinations related to the obsessional topic. The variety of lexical units employed here is restricted, and the are many repetitions. This naturally leads to rapid saturation. This is reflected in the parabolic form of Zipf's curve. Disorders of the second type are characterized by multiple topics and the absence of a consistent subject, the lexicon is here varied and chaotic. Thus such a text represents unsaturated sets having Zipf's parameter ϒ « 1 and small values of Herdan's parameter ϒ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]