Cognitive impairment is a common and disabling symptom of schizophrenia and has adverse effects on functional outcome. Improvement in cognitive function has now been identified as a major target in the treatment of schizophrenia. Cognitive remediation strategies where people with schizophrenia are required to speak aloud while performing learning tasks have shown some success. The present study compared performance on tasks requiring parallel vocalization with task performance when the person did not speak aloud. Results showed selective benefits of verbal strategy on a neuropsychological task requiring multiple executive functions but not on tasks requiring simpler single-component cognitive functions.