Schizophrenia and the structure of language: The linguist's view

Abstract

Patients with schizophrenia often display unusual language impairments. This is a wide ranging critical review of the literature on language in schizophrenia since the 19th century. We survey schizophrenic language level by level, from phonetics through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.There are at least two kinds of impairment (perhaps not fully distinct): thought disorder, or failure to maintain a discourse plan, and schizophasia, comprising various dysphasia-like impairments such as clanging, neologism, and unintelligible utterances.Thought disorder appears to be primarily a disruption of executive function and pragmatics, perhaps with impairment of the syntax-semantics interface; schizophasia involves disruption at other levels. Phonetics is also often abnormal (manifesting as flat intonation or unusual voice quality), but phonological structure, morphology, and syntax are normal or nearly so (some syntactic impairments have been demonstrated). Access to the lexicon is clearly impaired, manifesting as stilted speech, word approximation, and neologism. Clanging (glossomania) is straightforwardly explainable as distraction by self-monitoring.Recent research has begun to relate schizophrenia, which is partly genetic, to the genetic endowment that makes human language possible. D

Communication Sequences and Survival Analysis

“…It has been argued that some fragments of of natural dialogue interactions are inherently more expressive than regular, and 5 The symbol a is meant to be suggestive of the English onomatopoeic expression, "achoo". 6 I have not proven that the addition of clocks as proposed here does not increase the expressivity of the framework beyond the expressivity of regular languages. The intuition behind the argument that regular grammars with clocks of this sort remain regular is that the "grouping" of symbols within sets, in an initial grammar, only ever includes a single terminal symbol, never a non-terminal symbol; thus, the effect of bracket matching on either side of a recursive use of a non-terminal symbol (such as is the prototype of a context-free grammar rule) does not occur.…”

“…That believable autonomous systems must be able to demonstrate naturalistic dialogue interactions follows from the fact that dialogue interactions inform diagnoses of pathological human conditions, such as schizophrenia [6]. The present article is programmatic in defining two approaches to studying dialogue interactions as temporal symbol sequences.…”

“…In modeling dialogue interactions with regular grammars, 6 the least expressive computational framework for capturing infinite sequence possibilities is invoked. Where Σ is the overall set of terminal symbols from the superposition of the grammars for each dimension, this does not entail the assertion that the set of interactions is best described by Σ * or Σ + , that any sequence of moves at all is well formed (although this may be the case, and is not ruled out, a priori.…”

Comportamento comunicativo de indivíduos com diagnóstico de esquizofrenia

“…It is important to highlight that syntactic simplifications occur most commonly in people who present more negative symptoms than positive symptoms, and that the syntactic complexity decreases with their chronic deterioration 35 .With respect to the lexicon, individuals with schizophrenia tend to use a limited vocabulary, which results in poverty of discourse 38 . The access to the lexicon is clearly affected in these individuals, with the occurrence of neologisms andparaphasia 20 .Poverty in the discourse, with limited vocabulary, was mainly observed in the narrative discourse and semantic judgment tests, the paraphasia and neologisms were observed in the interpretation of metaphors test.…”

“…The pragmatics subfield involves diverse rules that support the appropriate use of language in specific social contexts and is the branch of linguistics that can best explain the adjustment between the subjectivity of language and the pragmatism of the context 6 .It is known that in schizophrenia one of the competences most affected is related to the difficulties in the integration of contextual information, and that pragmatic competence possibly constitutes one of the language components most affected in this disease [33][34][35] .…”