Higher-order language dysfunctions as a possible neurolinguistic endophenotype for schizophrenia: Evidence from patients and their unaffected first degree relatives.

Pawełczyk, Agnieszka; Łojek, Emilia; Żurner, Natalia; Gawłowska-Sawosz, Marta; Pawełczyk, Tomasz

doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2018.05.070

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 128 publications

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“…A temporal deficit would be also consistent with reports of turn-taking deficits (Sichlinger et al, 2019). Healthy speakers tend to indicate turn-giving with prosodic markings (Levinson, 2016), but patients often fail to do so (Bellani et al, 2009;Colle et al, 2013;Pawełczyk et al, 2018b). In particular, the timing of turn-giving is affected, such that variance in utterance duration decreases and variance in pause duration increases (Alpert et al, 2000).…”

Section: Prosody and Syntax: Abnormal Delta-band Oscillations?supporting

confidence: 75%

Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Assessing Neural Tracking to Characterize the Underlying Disorder(s)?

Meyer¹,

Lakatos²,

He³

2020

Preprint

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Deficits in language production and comprehension are characteristic of schizophrenia. To date, it remains unclear whether these deficits arise from dysfunctional linguistic knowledge, or dysfunctional predictions derived from the linguistic context. Alternatively, the deficits could be a result of dysfunctional neural tracking of auditory information resulting in decreased auditory information fidelity and even distorted information. Here, we discuss possible ways for clinical neuroscientists to employ neural tracking methodology to independently characterize deficiencies on the auditory–sensory and abstract linguistic levels. This might lead to a mechanistic understanding of the deficits underlying language related disorder(s) in schizophrenia. We propose to combine naturalistic stimulation, measures of speech–brain synchronization, and computational modeling of abstract linguistic knowledge and predictions. This orthogonal assessment may be exploited for an objective and differential diagnosis of schizophrenia, as well as a better understanding of the disorder on the functional level—illustrating the potential of neural tracking methodology as translational tool in a range of psychotic populations.

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Section: Prosody and Syntax: Abnormal Delta-band Oscillations?supporting

confidence: 75%

Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Assessing Neural Tracking to Characterize the Underlying Disorder(s)?

Meyer¹,

Lakatos²,

He³

2020

Preprint

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“…These results indicate that pragmatic impairment should not be merely reduced to the underlying cognitive deficits and highlight the domain specificity of pragmatic ability. This type of empirical evidence is particularly important given Pawełczyk et al (2018) proposal. The authors investigated the presence of pragmatic impairment in patients with schizophrenia and their healthy first-degree relatives and argued that pragmatic dysfunction could be considered a vulnerability marker in patients with schizophrenia and that its assessment could help diagnosis during the early stage of the illness.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ability of Patients With Schizophrenia to Comprehend and Produce Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Intentions: The Role of Theory of Mind and Executive Functions

Bosco

Berardinelli²,

Parola

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Patients with schizophrenia are often described as impaired in several cognitive domains. Specifically, patients with schizophrenia often exhibit problems in solving tasks requiring theory of mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to ascribe mental states to oneself and others, communicative-pragmatic ability, i.e., the ability to use language and non-verbal expressive means to convey meaning in a given context, and executive functions (EF). This study aims to investigate the role of cognitive functions, such as general intelligence, selective attention, processing speed, and especially EF (working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and planning), and ToM in explaining the performance of individual with schizophrenia in comprehending and producing communicative acts expressed with different communicative intentions (i.e., sincere, deceitful, and ironic), and realized through linguistic and extralinguistic/non-verbal expressive means. Thirty-two patients with schizophrenia and an equal number of healthy controls performed tasks aiming to investigate their capacity to comprehend and produce sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts in addition to a series of cognitive tasks evaluating EF and ToM. The results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia performed worse than the controls in the comprehension and production of all pragmatic phenomena investigated, as well as in all the cognitive functions examined. The patients with schizophrenia also exhibited an increasing trend of difficulty in comprehending and producing sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts expressed through either linguistic or extralinguistic means. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis of the patients’ performance on the pragmatic tasks revealed that overall, the role of attention, general intelligence, and processing speed did not appear to significantly explain the patients’ communicative-pragmatic performance. The inclusion of EF into the analysis did not contribute to increase the explained variance of the patients’ ability to comprehend and produce the various pragmatic phenomena investigated. Only the addition of ToM could significantly increase the explained variance, but only in the comprehension and production of deceit expressed by language and the production of sincere communicative acts, also limited to linguistic production. We conclude that neither EF nor ToM are able to explain the decreasing trend detected in the patients’ pragmatic performance.

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“…In sum, results about the relationship between the use of nonemotional prosody and vulnerability to psychosis (27,33,37) are inconclusive. Evidence for impairment in non-emotional prosody processing in first-episode schizophrenia, in ultra-high risk-or in first-degree relative groups was not found, but this last result (33) was not confirmed in larger samples of patients with first episode schizophrenia (27,37). Interestingly, the Right Hemisphere Language Battery was not originally conceived for patients with schizophrenia.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These studies also enrolled patients with first episode schizophrenia (31,32). Contrary to these findings, Pawełczyk and colleagues (26,33,37) recently reported a significant difference between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls in the use of prosody to decode the communicative purpose of the speaker. They tested patients with schizophrenia, patients with first episode schizophrenia, participants at ultra-high risk of psychosis and first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia by means of the "Right Hemisphere Language Battery".…”

Section: Perception Of Non-emotional Prosody In Patients With Schizopmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech Prosody as a Bridge Between Psychopathology and Linguistics: The Case of the Schizophrenia Spectrum

et al. 2020

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Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders experience severe difficulties in interpersonal communication, as described by traditional psychopathology and current research on social cognition. From a linguistic perspective, pragmatic abilities are crucial for successful communication. Empirical studies have shown that these abilities are significantly impaired in this group of patients. Prosody, the tone of voice with which words and sentences are pronounced, is one of the most important carriers of pragmatic meaning and can serve a range of functions from linguistic to emotional ones. Most of the existing literature on prosody of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders focuses on the expression of emotion, generally showing significant impairments. By contrast, the use of non-emotional prosody in these patients is scarcely investigated. In this paper, we first present a linguistic model to classify prosodic functions. Second, we discuss existing studies on the use of non-emotional prosody in these patients, providing an overview of the state of the art. Third, we delineate possible future lines of research in this field, also taking into account some classical psychopathological assumptions, for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

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Higher-order language dysfunctions as a possible neurolinguistic endophenotype for schizophrenia: Evidence from patients and their unaffected first degree relatives.

Cited by 22 publications

References 128 publications

Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Assessing Neural Tracking to Characterize the Underlying Disorder(s)?

Language Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: Assessing Neural Tracking to Characterize the Underlying Disorder(s)?

The Ability of Patients With Schizophrenia to Comprehend and Produce Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Intentions: The Role of Theory of Mind and Executive Functions

Speech Prosody as a Bridge Between Psychopathology and Linguistics: The Case of the Schizophrenia Spectrum

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