Patients with schizophrenia often display hallucination and semantic deficits, and their positive symptoms of delusion and speech disorganization often reveal the activation of inappropriate semantic representations [1]. The verbal content of hallucination and the delusion in schizophrenia generally produce social or express personal or emotionally charged meanings [2]. Therefore one might speculate that, when these patients listen to the ambiguous sounds such as the auditory illusion, they might report hearing words which reflect their inappropriate semantic representation.

The auditory illusion occurs in both the healthy people and the psychiatric patients [3,4]. The auditory system does not faithfully transmit the sound information as it arrives at our ears, but alters and reorganizes this information in various ways, so we sometimes experience an auditory illusion when the sounds we perceive do not correspond to those that were actually presented [5]. The subjective experience is sometimes dissociated from a physical input, such as in verbal transformations where the subjective changes of percepts are continually caused by listening to a repeating word without pause. Therefore, the auditory illusions provide us with clues to examine how auditory percepts are formed in the brain [6]. For example, when the Japanese people listened to a 90-sec session of 265 repetition of the word “banana” spoken by a female native Japanese speaker, they reported words they heard as “nan-pa”, “nan-do”, “nappa” and some other nonsense words [6].

Another illusion reported by Deutsch [7] is the auditory octave illusion. Through earphones, people hear two tones spaced an octave apart that are repeatedly presented to both ears in alternation without pause. When the right ear receives the high tone, the left ear receives the low tone, and vice versa. However, most people experience exactly the same phenomenon - the tone that had appeared in the right ear still appears in the right ear, and the tone that had appeared in the left ear still appears in the left ear, regardless of earphone reverses or total duration of time. Later, Deutsch improved this pattern into a “High-Low” word illusion [8] and a phantom word presentation – the “Harvey” word illusion [9]. The “High-Low” word illusion adopts natural sounds of the word “high” and “low” pronounced by a woman instead of the high and low tones respectively; and for phantom words, either two words or a single word composed of two syllables are repeated over and over again, while these two words or syllables substituted two tones in octave illusion. Interestingly, when listening to the “High-Low” word illusion through the stereo loudspeakers, the English-speaking people have reported hearing English words such as the “buy loan”, “long time”, “no, no” and “boatman” [8], the Chinese-speaking people on the other hand, have reported hearing Chinese words such as “开端 (beginning)”, “看一看 (have a look)”, “ (buy)”, and “快点 (hurry up, at once)”, and some words correspond to the personality traits of the individual under test [10]. When listening to one of the phantom word “Harvey”, the English-speaking people have reported hearing the word and phrases such as “coffee”, “popcorn”, “think big”, “honeycomb” and “convict” [9]. It is unclear what would the Chinese people report when hearing from the phantom word “Harvey”, or whether the reported word will be related to the normal or pathological personality traits of the individual.

Citation: You Xu, Hongying Fan, Qianqian Gao, Hongjing Mao,Yonghua Zhang et al. (2014) Reporting Meaningful Chinese Words While Listening To the Deutsch Word Illusions in Chinese Patients with Cluster A Personality Disorders. J Psychiatry 18:197. doi: 10.4172/Psychiatry.1000197

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