Formal thought disorder in schizophrenia through the lens of chinese

• Autores: Ruoyang Shi
• Directores de la Tesis: Joana Rosselló Ximenes (dir. tes.), Peter McKenna (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2022
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Paola Fuentes Claramonte (presid.), Lluís Barceló Coblijn (secret.), Evelina Leivada (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Lingüísticos, Literarios y Culturales por la Universidad de Barcelona
• Materias:
  • Ciencias médicas
    • Ciencias clínicas
    • Psiquiatría
  • Lingüística
    • Lingüística aplicada
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• Resumen

  • This thesis examines a hitherto uninvestigated aspect of formal thought disorder (FTD), a core symptom of schizophrenia that manifests itself as speech which is difficult to follow often to the point of complete unintelligibility. Linguistic studies have found evidence of both lexico-semantic and grammatical within-sentence abnormalities in the expressed speech of schizophrenic patients with FTD, with some studies arguing that the former is critical. In Chinese, the absence of articles and the preference for ellipsis (i.e., silent phonology) instead of pronouns for reference tracking purposes make it possible to further examine the evidence they found for a possible a lexical contribution to FTD. With the goal of further investigating whether lexical as opposed to grammatical abnormality characterizes the speech of schizophrenic patients with FTD, two experiments were designed and run on Chinese-speaking schizophrenic patients, who either showed (N= 9) or did not show (N= 10) FTD. Healthy controls (N= 19) were also examined. Both experiments involved the use of Chinese classifiers (CL), which span a continuum from a lexical to a grammatical end. Experiment 1 tested the use of CLs at the level of phrases and experiment 2 at the level of sentences.Taken together, the results of both experiments support the view that there is a significant lexical contribution to the linguistic abnormality seen in FTD. This finding is in accordance with those of some existing linguistic studies of FTD, although it is not a universally accepted interpretation of the literature. The findings of this thesis are also in line with the overuse of lexical cohesion found by Rochester and Martin (1979) in FTD. The lexical aspect of classifier abnormality, however, was seen in association with some evidence of grammatical abnormality as well. Under the assumption that lexicon and grammar form a continuum, these results indicate that in the complex task of building a sentence a lexical impairment may affect grammar in a correlational manner.