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Speech Abnormalities
Using speech samples of 100 patients suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar
illness and major depression, we addressed the question of the extent to which
the linguistic abnormalities in the speech of these patients represent
diagnosis-specific characteristics, or constitute independent, syndrome-like
dimensions of the illnesses. All speech samples were transcribed by a professional
linguist who was blind to both identity and diagnosis of the patients. The
majority of the deviant linguistic variables was found to be common to all
three diagnostic groups under comparison, while only a few linguistic variables
exhibited statistically significant between-group differences.
Linguistically Deviant Speech
The variety of subtle between-group differences allowed us,
when the respective variables were analysed as a multivariate entity, to
discriminate between the diagnostic groups at an overall performance of 72.7%
correctly classified patients. There was an almost complete lack of association
between linguistic abnormalities and psychopathology syndromes. In particular, we
found no correlation between the syndrome "formal thought disorder" and the large
variety of linguistic variables used in this investigation. In consequence,
we conjecture that linguistically deviant speech characteristics represent
an independent syndrome complex manifested at varying intensities across
mental illnesses, and that this syndrome complex deserves greater attention
not only with respect to the principal understanding of the underlying
disturbances, but also as a potential target of therapeutical intervention.
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of the speech output of schizophrenic, bipolar, and depressive patients.
Psychopathology 2002; 35(4): 220-227
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Characteristic variability of spectral intensities among depressive patients ("intonation").
The variations of spectral intensities are plotted along the y-axis on log-proportional scales and
as a function of frequency (x-axis: 7 octaves covering the frequency range of 64-8192Hz).
Please note:
Depression significantly reduces the dynamic expressiveness of human voices, thus greatly reducing
inter-individual differences. As a direct consequence, the patients' voices become more similar to
each other ("depressive voice"). Voices regain their distinct individuality during recovery.
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