Speech Fluency and Schizophrenic Negative Signs

Abstract

The spontaneous speech of negative-syndrome schizophrenia patients is underproductive and contains many hesitations and pauses. Acoustic analysis of the patient's speech during interview reveals that the duration of pauses, independent of other linguistic or paralinguistic measures, correlates strongly with the clinician's impressions of the patient's flat affect and alogia. Pausing is less related to associality and other aspects of the negative syndrome. The hesitations appear to reflect a word-finding difficulty that, together with neuropsychological evidence of compromised performance on word fluency tasks, suggests a specific speech generation difficulty. The significant relationship between pausing and both flat affect and alogia suggests that the two negative signs share phenomenal and psychometric properties. The examination of speech generation mechanisms may provide an informative avenue for study of schizophrenic psychopathology. Acoustic analysis reveals processes that are not apparent to the clinician and may provide a useful basis for clinical assessments and research.