Cokal, Derya, Sevilla, Gabriel, Jones, William, Zimmerer, Vitor, Deamer, Felicity, Douglas, Maggie, Spencer, Helen, Turkington, Douglas, Ferrier, Nicol, Varley, Rosemary, Watson, Stuart and Hinzen, Wolfram (2018). The language profile of formal thought disorder. npj Schizophrenia, 4 ,
Abstract
Formal thought disorder (FTD) is clinically manifested as disorganized speech, but there have been only few investigations of its linguistic properties. We examined how disturbance of thought may relate to the referential function of language as expressed in the use of noun phrases (NPs) and the complexity of sentence structures. We used a comic strip description task to elicit language samples from 30 participants with schizophrenia (SZ), 15 with moderate or severe FTD (SZ + FTD), and 15 minimal or no FTD (SZ −FTD), as well as 15 first-degree relatives of people with SZ (FDRs) and 15 neurotypical controls (NC). We predicted that anomalies in the normal referential use of NPs, sub-divided into definite and indefinite NPs, would identify FTD; and also that FTD would also be linked to reduced linguistic complexity as specifically measured by the number of embedded clauses and of grammatical dependents. Participants with SZ + FTD produced more referential anomalies than NC and produced the fewest definite NPs, while FDRs produced the most and thus also differed from NC. When referential anomalies were classed according to the NP type in which they occurred, the SZ + FTD group produced more anomalies in definite NPs than NC. Syntactic errors did not distinguish groups, but the SZ + FTD group exhibited significantly less syntactic complexity than non-SZ groups. Exploratory regression analyses suggested that production of definite NPs distinguished the two SZ groups. These results demonstrate that FTD can be identified in specific grammatical patterns which provide new targets for detection, intervention, and neurobiological studies.
Publication DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41537-018-0061-9 |
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Divisions: | ?? 53981500Jl ?? College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities |
Additional Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2024 16:22 |
Date Deposited: | 21 Nov 2019 15:12 |
Full Text Link: | |
Related URLs: |
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PURE Output Type: | Article |
Published Date: | 2018-09-19 |
Accepted Date: | 2018-08-21 |
Authors: |
Cokal, Derya
Sevilla, Gabriel Jones, William Zimmerer, Vitor Deamer, Felicity ( 0000-0001-6466-9211) Douglas, Maggie Spencer, Helen Turkington, Douglas Ferrier, Nicol Varley, Rosemary Watson, Stuart Hinzen, Wolfram |