Psychotic disorders remain one of the main contributing factors of global disease burden. It has long been known that psychotic disorders are associated with alterations of speech and language and that these symptoms relate to different dimensions of the core psychopathology of psychotic disorders. However, only today the rapid technological developments in neuroimaging, speech recording as well as the analysis of speech and text on the basis of language-models such as GPT allow for an unique opportunity to characterise language abnormalities in patients with psychotic disorders. These insights offer a novel interdisciplinary research field between neurolinguistics, cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry with the potential to provide new avenues for treatment, diagnostics and personalised predictions. In the present symposium, we will demonstrate complementary ways how these approaches can be employed in the research of psychotic disorders. Valeria Lucarini will present recent findings on semi-automatic analysis of turn-taking patterns in Italian-speaking subjects with and without schizophrenia and how these relate to different dimensions of psychopathology. Derya Cokal will report the language profile of Turkish participants with a first episode of psychosis, ultra-high risk syndrome for psychosis, and familial risk for psychosis. Afterwards Wolfram Hinzen will report computational analyses of semantic structure in spontaneous speech and their brain-functional correlates. Lastly, Philipp Homan will report findings regarding the relationship of language network dysfunction and formal thought disorders in patients with schizophrenia.
15:30 Uhr
Turn-taking analysis and psychopathology in patients with schizophrenia
V. Lucarini (Paris, FR)
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Autor:innen:
V. Lucarini (Paris, FR)
M. Grice (Cologne, DE)
S. Wehrle (Cologne, DE)
F. Cangemi (Cologne, DE)
F. Giustozzi (IT)
S. Amorosi (IT)
F. Rasmi (IT)
K. Vogeley (DE)
M. Krebs (FR)
M. Tonna (IT)
Background
Patients with schizophrenia show severe difficulties in interpersonal communication. From a linguistic point of view, they can display impairments in many areas. Thanks to the development of automated objective linguistic analysis techniques, the exploration of schizophrenia speech has seen a significant expansion in recent years. However, the existing literature traditionally adopts a single-subject analysis approach. This neglects the dyadic interaction that should be the fundamental unit of analysis when focusing on communicative behaviour. Therefore, very little is known about how these patients manage conversational interactions. Moreover, the relationship between linguistic features, psychopathology and patients’ subjectivity received limited attention.
Methods
We used a novel semi-automated methodology to explore dyadic conversations involving 60 participants (30 patients with schizophrenia – SCZ; 30 healthy controls – HC) and medical doctors. High quality double-channel recordings were obtained to quantify turn-taking patterns. We also investigated the patients’ psychopathological dimensions and subjective experiences using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale for Schizophrenia (PANSS), the Examination of Anomalous Self Experience scale (EASE), the Autism Rating Scale (ARS) and the Abnormal Bodily Phenomena questionnaire (ABPq).
Results
Conversations involving patients with schizophrenia were characterised by different turn-taking patterns in both patients and interviewers. Dialogues from the schizophrenia group had higher levels of overlap and mutual silence. Mutual silence was associated with negative symptom severity, while, contrary to our predictions, no dialogical feature was correlated with anomalous subjective experiences.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that the distinct turn-taking behaviour in interviews with schizophrenia patients express reduced interactional coordination.
15:52 Uhr
Referential noun phrases distribute differently in Turkish speakers with schizophrenia
D. Cokal (Köln, DE)
16:36 Uhr
Language network dysfunction and formal thought disorder in schizophrenia
P. Homan (Zürich, CH)