Main completed projects

(1) Language markers of Formal Thought Disorder (FTD): FTD is clinically manifest as disorganized speech, but its purely linguistic dimensions have not been well-researched. In a number of studies in both Spanish and English-speaking patients, we have found evidence that speech in FTD exhibits a reduction of definite noun phrases and more anomalous referential uses of these. This is particularly noteworthy since we had hypothesized definiteness to be a dimension of meaning that is inherently grammatically mediated. We therefore concluded that discourse in FTD manifests a linguistic problem, at the level of using grammar to configure specific forms of referential meaning. We have also documented anomalous patterns of dysfluency (pauses in specific syntactic positions), which distinguish patients from controls and patients without FTD. (2) As one of the first studies in this domain, we have subjected word-by-word literal transcriptions of hallucinated voice speech to a linguistic analysis. The analysis showed that voice speech, despite its often conversational setting, involves a reduction of first-person reference relative to non-first person reference. Moreover, in our group of very frequent voice hearers, voice speech exhibited virtually no connectivity at the grammatical level, whether in terms of grammatical connections between clauses or at the level of anaphoric noun phrases. 

Our long-term aim is to understand the broader role of language in the neuropsychiatry of schizophrenia and the cognitive changes that take place in disorganized speech in FTD, anomalous speech perception in auditory verbal hallucinations, and language losing propositional or referential content in delusions. 

Ongoing projects

In a sample of very frequent voice hearers (overlapping with the one of the above behavioural study), we investigate with fMRI, in cooperation with Pilar Salgado and Paola Fuentes from FIDMAG, how different forms of external speech are perceived by such patients and their control groups.