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Helping hands? Gesture and self-repair in schizophrenia

Successful social encounters require mutual understanding between interacting partners, and patients with schizophrenia are known to experience difficulties in social interaction. Several studies have shown that in general people compensate for verbal difficulties by employing additional multimodal resources such as hand gesture. We hypothesise that this will be impaired in patients with schizophrenia, and present a preliminary study to address this question. The results show that during social interaction, schizophrenia patients repair their own speech less. In addition, although increased hand gesture is correlated with increased self-repair in healthy controls, there is no such association in patients with schizophrenia, or their interlocutors. This suggests that multimodal impairments are not merely seen on an individual level but may be a feature of patients’ social encounters.