ArticleSchizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany)2022
Progressive changes in descriptive discourse in First Episode Schizophrenia: a longitudinal computational semantics study.
Article in Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Natural language processing for mental health interventions: a systematic review and research framework.Translational psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- TOPSY: A picture description dataset to examine speech, language and communication in untreated first episode psychosis.Data in brief · 2026Article
- Clinical psychopathology-based early relapse prediction model using speech and language in psychosis.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Review
- Expressive pragmatic language in mood and psychotic disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Quantifying improvement of psychotic symptoms in clozapine-treated schizophrenia: clinical note analysis with large language models.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Reduced linguistic coherence in psychosis defies semantic similarity accounts and relates to altered large-scale cortical hierarchy.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Grounding psychosis research: why observable signs should anchor biological investigations.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Three dimensions of speech coherence in people with early psychosis and their family members.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Lexical meaning is lower dimensional in psychosis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Network analysis of relationships among psychopathology, cognitive function, and psychosocial functioning in independent samples of Chinese with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Natural Language Understanding to Assess Oral Health-Related Quality of Life: A Cross-Sectional Study Incorporating a Mixed Methods Approach.Journal of oral rehabilitation · 2025Article
- Detecting schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis vulnerability and major depressive disorder from 5 minutes of online-collected speech.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Hearing vocals to recognize schizophrenia: speech discriminant analysis with fusion of emotions and features based on deep learning.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- The structure of spontaneous speech changes in Alzheimer's disease: Crosslingual evidence from English and Greek.PloS one · 2025Article
- Associations of Vocal Features, Psychiatric Symptoms, and Cognitive Functions in Schizophrenia.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2025Article
- Automated speech and language markers of longitudinal changes in psychosis symptoms.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Increasing the Construct Validity of Computational Phenotypes of Mental Illness Through Active Inference and Brain Imaging.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Approximating the semantic space: word embedding techniques in psychiatric speech analysis.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Changes in the structure of spontaneous speech predict the disruption of hierarchical brain organization in first-episode psychosis.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Theory-Driven Analysis of Natural Language Processing Measures of Thought Disorder Using Generative Language Modeling.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Computational semantics, a branch of computational linguistics, involves automated meaning analysis that relies on how words occur together in natural language. This offers a promising tool to study schizophrenia. At present, we do not know if these word-level choices in speech are sensitive to the illness stage (i.e., acute untreated vs. stable established state), track cognitive deficits in major domains (e.g., cognitive control, processing speed) or relate to established dimensions of formal thought disorder. In this study, we collected samples of descriptive discourse in patients experiencing an untreated first episode of schizophrenia and healthy control subjects (246 samples of 1-minute speech; n = 82, FES = 46, HC = 36) and used a co-occurrence based vector embedding of words to quantify semantic similarity in speech. We obtained six-month follow-up data in a subsample (99 speech samples, n = 33, FES = 20, HC = 13). At baseline, semantic similarity was evidently higher in patients compared to healthy individuals, especially when social functioning was impaired; but this was not related to the severity of clinically ascertained thought disorder in patients. Across the study sample, higher semantic similarity at baseline was related to poorer Stroop performance and processing speed. Over time, while semantic similarity was stable in healthy subjects, it increased in patients, especially when they had an increasing burden of negative symptoms. Disruptions in word-level choices made by patients with schizophrenia during short 1-min descriptions are sensitive to interindividual differences in cognitive and social functioning at first presentation and persist over the early course of the illness.
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