Formal Thought Disorder (FTD) and automates speech assessment

Question 1

Why is language important in psychology?

Answer 1

1. Diagnosis relies on symptoms which are communicated with language
2. All interventions are based on clear communication between patient and clinician

Question 2

What is syntax?

Answer 2

How we arrange words and phrases to create well-formed sentences

It defines the rules that must be followed when forming a sentence from words, clauses, punctuation and phrases.

This includes: correct words, word order, correct tense and subject-verb agreement

Question 3

Thought disorder and factor analysis clusters

Answer 3

Thought Disorder: a key aspect of Schizophrenia:

3 clusters of symptoms

Psychomotor poverty (e.g. blanted affect)

Disorganisation syndrom (e.g. speech or though disorder)

Reality distortion syndroms (positive symptoms)

Question 4

What counts as negative though disorder?

Answer 4

Poverty of speech, restricted quantity of speech, poverty of content

Question 5

What counts as positive though disorder?

Answer 5

Neologisms, going on the tangents, illogicality

Question 6

What are some Manual measures of formal thought disorder?

Answer 6

1. Thought, Language and Communication scale – Andreasen
2. Language Index – Liddle

Question 7

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP) (for Formal thought disorder) ?

Answer 7

Field of study at the intersection of computer science and linguistics that uses automated analyses to understand natural human language

e.g. can look at speech in tangent and analyse how related the sentences are and how far the person is drifting off the topic

Question 8

How is analysis of form done?

Answer 8

Using graph analysis based on graph theory
- You plot the speech in a graph
- Can see the LSC (largest strongly connected component = many nodes connected many times) and LCC (max connected number of nodes)

Question 9

What seems to be the indication from research on UHR groups and speech form?

Answer 9

UHR-t associated with:
More illogical thinking, more poverty of content
- Less referential cohesion
- lower scores on two measures of speech connectedness

Question 10

What can we analyse in an acoustic analysis?

Answer 10

We can analyse frequency of domain- frequency of formants

Aplitutede domain (loudness)

Mean length in (s) of voiced and unvoiced regions

Issues: smoking influence the quality of this and smoking is more common in psychosis populations than in general one

Question 11

Advantagues of automated speech assessment

Answer 11

1. Quantify different aspects of thought disorder in a mathematical, unbiased and repeatable way
2. We can use these measures in machine learning and predictive models to stratify patients and predict likely clinical outcomes
3. For large studies like ENTER the automated nature is a huge time and cost saving

Question 12

Future direction in formal thought disorder research (4)

Answer 12

1. Develop a set of standardized measures and procedures to elicit speech, transcribe it and analyze it
2. Have more inclusive TAT images
3. Expand to languages beyond English
4. Have longitudinal studies and have replications of studies from all spectrum of psychosis

Question 13

How is syntax affected in FTD?

Answer 13

Typically, phonology and morphology are not affected in FTD. However, with increasing FTD, syntax becomes simpler