Schizophrenic children's utilization of images and words in performance of cognitive tasks.

Reiss et al. (1982) tested how schizophrenic children use pictures and words while learning. They gave kids a paired-associate task. Kids had to match new picture-word pairs and word-word pairs.

Researchers compared the scores of schizophrenic in-patients with scores from other hospitalized children who did not have schizophrenia.

The schizophrenic group scored lower on the learning task overall. The gap was larger when the pairs were made of words instead of pictures.

The same children also scored lower on a performance IQ test.

Channell et al. (2013) and Grove et al. (2017) later saw a similar word weakness in children with intellectual disability. They showed that poor phonological skills explain the reading gap. The 1982 study adds schizophrenia to the list of disorders that show a verbal-processing hitch.

Farley et al. (2022) widened the lens to children with mild-borderline ID plus other psychiatric diagnoses. Like L et al., they found large processing-speed and working-memory deficits. Both papers warn that these cognitive scores do not predict behaviour problems, so do not use them to guess how a child will act.

Steinbrink et al. (2014) and Tong et al. (2019) used quasi-experimental designs with dyslexic children. They also found negative results on auditory and visual tasks. The pattern across decades shows that many clinical groups struggle with basic verbal or visual cues, not just kids with schizophrenia.

When you test a child with schizophrenia, present new skills with pictures first, then fade in words. Check both visual and verbal memory, but place more teaching time on the verbal side. Do not assume a low score means poor effort; it may reflect a built-in learning style. Use errorless prompting and quick picture cues to bridge the gap.