Phonetic measures of reduced tongue movement correlate with negative symptom severity in hospitalized patients with first-episode schizophrenia-spectrum disorders

SCHIZOPHRENIA RESEARCH

卷:142

Article

Covington, Michael A.²  Lunden, S. L. Anya³  Cristofaro, Sarah L.⁴  Wan, Claire Ramsay⁴  Bailey, C. Thomas²  Broussard, Beth¹  Fogarty, Robert²  Johnson, Stephanie⁴  Zhang, Shayi²  Compton, Michael T.¹ 

[1] George Washington Univ, Sch Med & Hlth Sci, Dept Psychiat & Behav Sci, Washington, DC 20037 USA

[2] Univ Georgia, Inst Artificial Intelligence, Athens, GA 30602 USA

[3] Univ Georgia, Program Linguist, Athens, GA 30602 USA

[4] Emory Univ, Sch Med, Dept Psychiat & Behav Sci, Atlanta, GA USA

关键词: Aprosody;    First-episode psychosis;    Linguistics;    Phonetics;    Schizophrenia;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.schres.2012.10.005

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Background: Aprosody, or flattened speech intonation, is a recognized negative symptom of schizophrenia, though it has rarely been studied from a linguistic/phonological perspective. To bring the latest advances in computational linguistics to the phenomenology of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, a clinical first-episode psychosis research team joined with a phonetics/computational linguistics team to conduct a preliminary, proof-of-concept study. Methods: Video recordings from a semi-structured clinical research interview were available from 47 first-episode psychosis patients. Audio tracks of the video recordings were extracted, and after review of quality, 25 recordings were available for phonetic analysis. These files were de-noised and a trained phonologist extracted a 1-minute sample of each patient's speech. WaveSurfer 1.8.5 was used to create, from each speech sample, a file of formant values (F0, F1, F2, where F0 is the fundamental frequency and F1 and F2 are resonance bands indicating the moment-by-moment shape of the oral cavity). Variability in these phonetic indices was correlated with severity of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative symptom scores using Pearson correlations. Results: A measure of variability of tongue front-to-back position-the standard deviation of F2-was statistically significantly correlated with the severity of negative symptoms (r=-0.446, p = 0.03). Conclusion: This study demonstrates a statistically significant and meaningful correlation between negative symptom severity and phonetically measured reductions in tongue movements during speech in a sample of first-episode patients just initiating treatment. Further studies of negative symptoms, applying computational linguistics methods, are warranted. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

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