On Identifying the Processes Underlying Schizophrenic Speech Disorder

Abstract

Speech of people with schizophrenia is often difficult to follow. There is evidence that neuropsychological deficits associated with schizophrenia explain some of the variance in speech disorder, but its nature and causes overall are not well understood. This study rated speech samples from 60 schizophrenic outpatients for thought disorder, conceptual disorganization, linguistic structural breakdown, and communication failure. A battery of neuropsychological tests potentially relevant to coherent speech production was administered, and associations between these variables and the speech measures were assessed. Consistent with previous research, the measure of functional effect, communication failure, was more highly associated with neuropsychological test performance than were the measures of putative cause: thought disorder, conceptual disorganization, or linguistic structural breakdown. Performance on tests of attention, immediate memory, working memory, organizational sequencing, and conceptual sequencing all were significantly related to the frequency of communication failures in the speech. In hierarchical regression, attention, working memory, and conceptual sequencing each contributed significantly and together explained 29% of the variance. Some other potential contributors to test in future research include auditory attention, internal source memory, emotional disturbances, and social cognitive deficits.

Lexical analysis in schizophrenia: How emotion and social word use informs our understanding of clinical presentation

“…A fourth limitation of this study is that participants tended to have been ill for long periods, and findings may not reflect word use in individuals with shorter durations of psychosis. To address these limitations, In the future, researchers should also seek to integrate lexical analysis with other types of speech instruments, such as latent semantic analysis and discourse incoherence measures, both of which have shown promise for investigating speech across the schizophrenia-spectrum (Docherty, 2012;Elvevag et al, 2007;Minor and Cohen, 2010;Minor and Cohen, 2012).…”

Speech-language intervention in schizophrenia: an integrative review

“…The procedure to evaluate language and communication in subjects with formal thought disorder was the Thought Disorders, Language and Communication Scale, which serves to identify speech and speech content poverty, distracted speech, tangentially, incoherence, neologisms and echolalia among others 17,18,22,26 . The Index of Communication Disturbances (IDC), which measures and identifies the words or phrases with a confusing meaning and recognizes six types of errors (vague references, confusing references, lack of references in the information, -Subjects with schizophrenia could have altered "autonomous components of linguistic processing" in addition to the deficits observed in the pragmatic and macro-structural coding of discourses what could have consequences in the morphosyntax area.…”

“…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…”

“…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 .…”