Cognitive control components and speech symptoms in people with schizophrenia

Abstract

Previous schizophrenia research suggests poor cognitive control is associated with schizophrenia speech symptoms. However, cognitive control is a broad construct. Two important cognitive control components are poor goal maintenance and poor verbal working memory storage. In the current research, people with schizophrenia (n = 45) performed three cognitive tasks that varied in their goal maintenance and verbal working memory storage demands. Speech symptoms were assessed using clinical rating scales, ratings of disorganized speech from typed transcripts, and self-reported disorganization. Overall, alogia was associated with both goal maintenance and verbal working memory tasks. Objectively rated disorganized speech was associated with poor goal maintenance and with a task that included both goal maintenance and verbal working memory storage demands. In contrast, self-reported disorganization was unrelated to either amount of objectively rated disorganized speech or to cognitive control task performance, instead being associated with negative mood symptoms. Overall, our results suggest that alogia is associated with both poor goal maintenance and poor verbal working memory storage and that disorganized speech is associated with poor goal maintenance. In addition, patients’ own assessment of their disorganization is related to negative mood, but perhaps not to objective disorganized speech or to cognitive control task performance.

Comparison of structural covariance with functional connectivity approaches exemplified by an investigation of the left anterior insula

“…Schizophrenia is associated with symptoms in the language domain [e.g. auditory verbal hallucinations (Jardri et al, 2011; Seal et al, 2004), but also with disorganized speech and alogia (Becker et al, 2012; DeLisi, 2001)], socio-emotional disturbances [e.g. flattened affect (Gur et al, 2006; Kirkpatrick et al, 2001) and social cognition deficits (Savla et al, 2013)] as well as working memory and executive function impairments (Dibben et al, 2009; Glahn et al, 2005; Lee and Park, 2005; Minzenberg et al, 2009).…”

Speech-language intervention in schizophrenia: an integrative review

“…The exclusion criteria comprehended systematic reviews, samples of subjects with another psychiatric pathology associated, samples of subjects younger than 18 years and older than 75 years. According to the language in which the articles were written the results indicated 9 in English [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and 2 in Spanish 25,26 . In relation to the country of origin it was verified articles from United States of America [16][17][18][20][21][22] , Brazil 19.23 , Italy 24 , Spain 26 and Chile…”

“…ambiguous meanings of the word, incorrect use of the word and lack of structural clarity) was applied for the evaluation of the disorganized discourse 16,21,20 .…”

“…The most obvious symptoms were related to the semantic-pragmatic area, speech coherence, verbal fluency, prosody, attention, planning, sequencing and facial expression [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]25 .…”

“…The investigations varied between individual case studies [18][19][20]25,26 and sample studies 16,17,[21][22][23][24] . Although the incidence of schizophrenia is greater in men 17,27 , in this review it was observed that only five articles specified the sex of participants 16,17,23,24,26 .…”