Although there have been several reports of investigations of speech perception in schizophrenia (Laffal, 1961; Lawson, McGhie and Chapman, 1964) in all cases the assumption was made that the patients’ difficulties arose, not from an inability to perceive the individual words, but from a deficiency in perceiving the words in a meaningful relationship to each other, as part of an organized pattern. In this study, however, instead of examining the performance of schizophrenic patients on a task involving the perception of sentences, as these earlier workers had done, we have used individual words as stimuli in a series of tests of speech perception.