Abstract
Everyday speech is produced with an intricate timing pattern and rhythm. Speech units follow each other with short interleaving pauses, which can be either bridged by fillers (erm, ah) or empty. Through their syntactic positions, pauses connect to the thoughts expressed. We investigated whether disturbances of thought in schizophrenia are manifest in patterns at this level of linguistic organization, whether these are seen in first degree relatives (FDR) and how specific they are to formal thought disorder (FTD). Spontaneous speech from 15 participants without FTD (SZ-FTD), 15 with FTD (SZ+FTD), 15 FDRs and 15 neurotypical controls (NC) was obtained from a comic strip retelling task and rated for pauses subclassified by syntactic position and duration. SZ-FTD produced significantly more unfilled pauses than NC in utterance-initial positions and before embedded clauses. Unfilled pauses occurring within clausal units did not distinguish any groups. SZ-FTD also differed from SZ+FTD in producing significantly more pauses before embedded clauses. SZ+FTD differed from NC and FDR only in producing longer utterance-initial pauses. FDRs produced significantly fewer fillers than NC. Results reveal that the temporal organization of speech is an important window on disturbances of the thought process and how these relate to language.
Highlights
Spontaneous speech in people with schizophrenia has long been shown to manifest altered patterns of linguistic organization, including reduced syntactic complexity and increased syntactic errors [1,2,3,4]
As linguistic measures are often related to general cognitive measures in SZ, and patients with formal thought disorder (FTD) are marked by greater cognitive decline than patients without FTD, [36,37,38] we explored associations between dysfluency patterns and general cognition (IQ), age, and education
Unlike in earlier work, [21, 35] participants with SZ did not produce more unfilled pauses after co-varying for IQ, age, and education. Those earlier results were obtained from reading tasks rather than spontaneous speech; nor did they discriminate between SZ with and without FTD
Summary
Spontaneous speech in people with schizophrenia has long been shown to manifest altered patterns of linguistic organization, including reduced syntactic complexity and increased syntactic errors [1,2,3,4]. This is unsurprising given close links between thought and language: speech production is nothing other than the process of converting a thought into a temporal sequence of speech units. Disturbances of the thought process are likely to be reflected in speech disturbances. Disturbing the rhythm of thought funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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