Changes in the structure of spontaneous speech predict the disruption of hierarchical brain organization in first-episode psychosis.

Psychosis implicates changes across a broad range of cognitive functions. These functions are cortically organized in the form of a hierarchy ranging from primary sensorimotor (unimodal) to higher-order association cortices, which involve functions such as language (transmodal). Language has long been documented as undergoing structural changes in psychosis.

[Development of Normative Data for the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) in the Elderly Population of Chile: A Multi-City Study].

Background: The Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is one of the most widely used tests to assess the global cognitive deterioration of older adults. There are many versions of this Test in Spanish. A validation study was previously conducted in Chile, but to date, no standards computed from a large population sample are available.

Perplexity of utterances in untreated first-episode psychosis: an ultra-high field MRI dynamic causal modelling study of the semantic network.

Background: Psychosis involves a distortion of thought content, which is partly reflected in anomalous ways in which words are semantically connected into utterances in speech. We sought to explore how these linguistic anomalies are realized through putative circuit-level abnormalities in the brain's semantic network.

Methods: Using a computational large-language model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), we quantified the contextual expectedness of a given word sequence (perplexity) across 180 samples obtained from descriptions of 3 pictures by patients with first-episode schizophrenia (FES) and controls matched for age, parental social status, and sex, scanned with 7 T ultra-high field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Aberrant brain language network in schizophrenia spectrum disorder: a systematic review of its relation to language signs beyond symptoms.

Background: Language disturbances are a core feature of schizophrenia, often studied as a formal thought disorder. The neurobiology of language in schizophrenia has been addressed within the same framework, that language and thought are equivalents considering symptoms and not signs. This review aims to systematically examine published peer-reviewed studies that employed neuroimaging techniques to investigate aberrant brain-language networks in individuals with schizophrenia in relation to linguistic signs.