The Discussing Abstract Ideas in Schizophrenia Corpus (DAIS-C) is small, specialised corpus of naturalistic speech featuring speakers with a formal diagnosis of schizophrenia (n=15) and speakers with no self-reported psychiatric or neuroleptic history (n=14). Interviews were unstructured and focused on the broad topics of linguistic creativity and participation in a psycholinguistic metaphor creation task. A bespoke transcription convention was developed with the aim of detailed true verbatim representations that were also economical and easy to read. Interviewer speech was also transcribed to aid investigations where this information might be useful. The resulting corpus is suited to quantitative and qualitative investigations.

Clinicians identified eligible participants with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, compliance with antipsychotic medication, and suitable capacity determined by a structured assessment. A purposive, maximum variation sampling approach has been applied to the eligible participant pool.