Exploring language and cognition in schizophrenia: Insights from computational analysis

Anomalies of language in schizophrenia: a trajectory of mathematical and computational analyses

“…Historically, psychia trists and other mental health professionals spent many psycho therapy sessions trying to determine what caused homosexuality, or gender incongruence, in unsuccessful efforts to "cure" these per sons. However, two people having a conversation in a room will never discover the "cause(s)" of anyone's sexual orientation or gen der identity 6 . Today, it is acknowledged that the "determinants" of any sexual orientation (homo , bi or hetero ) or gender identity (trans gender or cisgender) remain unknown.…”

“…Another key question regards the generalizability of findings a cross languages and cultures, and how language specific features may be informative. For example, in a large cross linguistic study of schizo phrenia patients (and controls) -who spoke Danish, Ger man or Chi nese -only second order coherence (i.e., the similarity between phrases separated by another intervening phrase) ro bustly generalized across languages, while other measures of co herence did not, for unclear reasons that require further study 6 . In another study of at risk individuals in Shanghai, both Mandarin based and English based NLP methods captured intercorrelated decreases in language specific coherence (and adjective use), but only Mandarin based NLP captured greater use of "localizers" (e.g., gongzuo shang, "during work"; or liangge ren zhijian, "be tween two people") in the at risk group 7 .…”

“…In another study, sentiment analysis was used to identify the emo tional tenor of spoken language in open ended interviews with at risk individuals, finding greater semantic similarity to "anger" in those who had concurrent suicidal ideation 6 .…”

“…In addition to language, the acoustics of spoken language in the schizophrenia spectrum can be assessed, including dysfluencies, timbre/quality, energy/loudness and pause, as well as face ex pression and gesture in the context of interview 6 . This yields rich multimodal time series of data that can be used to assess incon gruence between different modalities (inappropriate affect) and attunement between conversation partners in language and face expression, indicative not only of psychiatric illness but also of therapeutic alliance.…”