Patients with schizophrenia often display unusual language impairments. This is a wide ranging critical review of the literature on language in schizophrenia since the 19th century. We survey schizophrenic language level by level, from phonetics through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.There are at least two kinds of impairment (perhaps not fully distinct): thought disorder, or failure to maintain a discourse plan, and schizophasia, comprising various dysphasia-like impairments such as clanging, neologism, and unintelligible utterances.Thought disorder appears to be primarily a disruption of executive function and pragmatics, perhaps with impairment of the syntax-semantics interface; schizophasia involves disruption at other levels. Phonetics is also often abnormal (manifesting as flat intonation or unusual voice quality), but phonological structure, morphology, and syntax are normal or nearly so (some syntactic impairments have been demonstrated). Access to the lexicon is clearly impaired, manifesting as stilted speech, word approximation, and neologism. Clanging (glossomania) is straightforwardly explainable as distraction by self-monitoring.Recent research has begun to relate schizophrenia, which is partly genetic, to the genetic endowment that makes human language possible. D

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Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in women, accompanied by greater psychological distress than other cancers. There is minimal but increasing awareness of the impact of lung cancer stigma (LCS) on patient outcomes. LCS is associated with increased symptom burden and decreased quality of life. The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of female long term lung cancer survivors in the context of LCS and examine how participants discursively adhere to or reject stigmatizing beliefs. Findings situated within Cataldo et al.’s theoretical model include: 1) addiction and tobacco marketing as possible precursors for LCS, 2) the possible role of expert providers as LCS enhancers, 3) response of overlapping complicated identity shifts, 4) simultaneous rejection and assumption of LCS, and 5) information control via advocacy activities as a LCS mitigation response. These findings expand the current understanding of LCS, and call for future conceptual exploration and theoretical revision, particularly with respect to the possibility of interaction between relevant related stigma(s) and LCS. As the number of women living with lung cancer increases, with longer survival times, the effect of LCS and other experiences of discrimination on patient outcomes could be substantial.

Speech disturbances are well-known symptoms contributing to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Subanesthetic doses of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist ketamine have been reported to produce positive and negative symptoms and cognitive impairments consistent with those seen in schizophrenia. Insofar as this is true, it constitutes evidence that the NMDA system is involved in schizophrenia. It is therefore of interest to know whether ketamine produces speech disturbances like those of schizophrenia. Quantitative computer-aided analysis of apparently normal speech can detect clinically relevant changes and differences that are not noticeable to the human observer. Accordingly, in this study, speech samples were analysed for repetitiousness, idea density, and verb density using software developed by the authors. The samples came from two experiments, a within-subjects study of healthy volunteers given intravenous ketamine versus placebo, and a between-groups study of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and comparable healthy controls.Our primary hypothesis was that in both schizophrenia and ketamine, repetitiousness would increase, since perserverative speech is a well-known symptom of schizophrenia. Our secondary hypotheses were that in both schizophrenia and ketamine, idea density and verb density would decrease as indicators of cognitive impairment. The primary hypothesis was confirmed in the schizophrenia experiment (between groups) and the ketamine experiment (within subjects). The secondary hypotheses were disconfirmed except that in the ketamine experiment, verb density was significantly lowered. Reduced use of verbs apparently reflects a cognitive impairment of a different type than repetitiousness, and further investigation is needed to determine whether this impairment occurs in psychosis.

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