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.

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).

The 'L-factor': Language as a transdiagnostic dimension in psychopathology.

Thoughts and moods constituting our mental life incessantly change. When the steady flow of this dynamics diverges in clinical directions, the possible pathways involved are captured through discrete diagnostic labels. Yet a single vulnerable neurocognitive system may be causally involved in psychopathological deviations transdiagnostically.

Navigating the semantic space: Unraveling the structure of meaning in psychosis using different computational language models.

Speech in psychosis has long been ascribed as involving 'loosening of associations'. We pursued the aim to elucidate its underlying cognitive mechanisms by analysing picture descriptions from 94 subjects (29 healthy controls, 18 participants at clinical high risk, 29 with first-episode psychosis, and 18 with chronic schizophrenia), using five language models with different computational architectures: FastText, which represents meaning non-contextually/statically; BERT, which represents contextual meaning sensitive to grammar and context; Infersent and SBERT, which provide sentential representations; and CLIP, which evaluates speech relative to a visual stimulus. These models were used to quantify semantic distances crossed between successive tokens/sentences, and semantic perplexity indicating unexpectedness in continuations.

Functional dysregulation of the auditory cortex in bilateral perisylvian polymicrogyria: Multiparametric case analysis of the absent speech phenotype.

The absence of speech is a clinical phenotype seen across neurodevelopmental syndromes, offering insights for neural language models. We present a case of bilateral perisylvian polymicrogyria (BPP) and complete absence of speech with considerable language comprehension and production difficulties. We extensively characterized the auditory speech perception and production circuitry by employing a multimodal neuroimaging approach.

Episodic Thinking in Alzheimer's Disease Through the Lens of Language: Linguistic Analysis and Transformer-Based Classification.

Purpose: Episodic memory decline is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and linked to deficits in episodic thinking directed to the future. We addressed the question whether a deficit in episodic thinking can be picked up directly from connected speech and its detection can be automatized.

Method: We linguistically classified 2,809 utterances (including embedded clauses in the utterances) from picture descriptions from 70 healthy older controls, 82 people with mild probable AD (pAD), and 46 people with moderate pAD for whether they were episodic, nonepisodic, or "other" (e.

Harnessing acoustic speech parameters to decipher amyloid status in individuals with mild cognitive impairment.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative condition characterized by a gradual decline in cognitive functions. Currently, there are no effective treatments for AD, underscoring the importance of identifying individuals in the preclinical stages of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to enable early interventions. Among the neuropathological events associated with the onset of the disease is the accumulation of amyloid protein in the brain, which correlates with decreased levels of A42 peptide in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).

Automated Classification of Cognitive Decline and Probable Alzheimer's Dementia Across Multiple Speech and Language Domains.

Background: Decline in language has emerged as a new potential biomarker for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD). It remains unclear how sensitive language measures are across different tasks, language domains, and languages, and to what extent changes can be reliably detected in early stages such as subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Method: Using a scene construction task for speech elicitation in a new Spanish/Catalan speaking cohort ( = 119), we automatically extracted features across seven domains, three acoustic (spectral, cepstral, and voice quality), one prosodic, and three from text (morpholexical, semantic, and syntactic).

Linguistic markers of psychosis in Mandarin Chinese: Relations to theory of mind.

Disorganized and impoverished language is a key feature of schizophrenia (Sz), but whether and which linguistic changes previously observed in Indo-European languages generalize to other languages remains unclear. Targeting Mandarin Chinese, we aimed to profile aspects of grammatical complexity that we hypothesized would be reduced in schizophrenia in a task of verbalizing social events. 51 individuals with Sz and 39 controls participated in the animated triangles task, a standardized measure of theory of mind (ToM), in which participants describe triangles moving in either a random or an 'intentional' condition.

Linguistic markers of autism spectrum conditions in narratives: A comprehensive analysis.

Narratives are regularly elicited as part of standardized assessments for autism spectrum conditions (ASC) such as the ADOS, but have rarely been utilized as linguistic data in their own right. We here aimed for a specific and comprehensive quantitative linguistic profile of such narratives across nominal, verbal, and clausal domains of grammatical organization, and error patterns. We manually transcribed and annotated narratives elicited from the ADOS from a sample of bilingual autistic Spanish-Catalan children ( = 18), matched with typically developing controls (n = 18) on vocabulary-based verbal IQ.

Coreference Delays in Psychotic Discourse: Widening the Temporal Window.

Background And Hypothesis: Any form of coherent discourse depends on saying different things about the same entities at different times. Such recurrent references to the same entity need to predictably happen within certain temporal windows. We hypothesized that a failure of control over reference in speakers with schizophrenia (Sz) would become manifest through dynamic temporal measures.

Natural Language Processing Markers for Psychosis and Other Psychiatric Disorders: Emerging Themes and Research Agenda From a Cross-Linguistic Workshop.

This workshop summary on natural language processing (NLP) markers for psychosis and other psychiatric disorders presents some of the clinical and research issues that NLP markers might address and some of the activities needed to move in that direction. We propose that the optimal development of NLP markers would occur in the context of research efforts to map out the underlying mechanisms of psychosis and other disorders. In this workshop, we identified some of the challenges to be addressed in developing and implementing NLP markers-based Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) in psychiatric practice, especially with respect to psychosis.

Brain correlates of speech perception in schizophrenia patients with and without auditory hallucinations.

The experience of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH, "hearing voices") in schizophrenia has been found to be associated with reduced auditory cortex activation during perception of real auditory stimuli like tones and speech. We re-examined this finding using 46 patients with schizophrenia (23 with frequent AVH and 23 hallucination-free), who underwent fMRI scanning while they heard words, sentences and reversed speech. Twenty-five matched healthy controls were also examined.

Grammar in 'agrammatical' aphasia: What's intact?

Background: Aphasia following cerebro-vascular accidents has been a primary source of insight for models of language in the brain. However, deviant language patterns in aphasia may reflect processing limitations and cognitive impairment more than language impairment per se.

Aims: We sought to obtain new evidence from spontaneous speech in Broca's aphasia (BA) for the intactness of grammatical knowledge, operationalized as the preservation of the basic hierarchical structure of syntactic projections.

Temporal Overlap Between Gestures and Speech in Poststroke Aphasia: Is There a Compensatory Effect?

Purpose: If language production is impaired, will gestures compensate? Evidence in favor of this prediction has often been argued to come from aphasia, but it remains contested. Here, we tested whether thought content not present in speech due to language impairment is manifested in gestures, in 20 people with dysfluent (Broca's) aphasia, 20 people with fluent (Wernicke's) aphasia, and 20 matched neurotypical controls.

Method: A new annotation scheme was created distinguishing types of gestures and whether they co-occurred with fluent or dysfluent/absent speech and were temporally aligned in content with coproduced speech.

Relations between language, non-verbal cognition, and conceptualization in non- or minimally verbal individuals with ASD across the lifespan.

Background & Aims: Individuals with non- or minimally verbal autism (nvASD) are primarily characterized by a severe speech production deficit, with speech limited to no or only a few words by school age. Significant unclarity remains over variability in language profiles across the lifespan, the nature of the language impairment seen, and (dis-) associations between linguistic and nonverbal cognitive measures.

Methods: To address these questions, we recruited both a school-age and an adult group with nvASD (total N = 49) and investigated relations between expressive and receptive language, and between these and nonverbal intelligence quotient (NVIQ) and sense-making capacities (the ComFor test).

Language level predicts perceptual categorization of complex reversible events in children.

Language plays a well-documented role in perceptual object categorization, but little is known about its role in the categorization of complex events. We explored this here with a perspective from age or developmentally appropriate language capacities in neurotypical children between the ages of two and four years (N = 21), and from delayed language development in a clinical group of children (N = 20), whose verbal mental ages (VMA) often fell far below their chronological ages (CAs). All participants watched two demonstrations of a series of transitive events (e.

Processing of linguistic deixis in people with schizophrenia, with and without auditory verbal hallucinations.

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a key symptom of schizophrenia (SZ) defined by anomalous perception of speech. Anomalies of processing external speech stimuli have also been reported in people with AVH, but it is unexplored which specific dimensions of language are processed differently. Using a speech perception task (passive listening), we here targeted the processing of deixis, a key dimension of language governing the contextual anchoring of speech in interpersonal context.

Breaking the flow of thought: Increase of empty pauses in the connected speech of people with mild and moderate Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: The profile of spontaneous speech in Alzheimer's disease (AD) includes increased pausing as a window into cognitive decline. We here aimed to further characterize the pausing profile of AD by linking pauses to the syntactic positions in which they appear and disease progression.

Methods: Speech was obtained through a picture description task, thus minimizing demands on episodic memory (EM), from a group of mild (N = 21) and moderate AD (N = 19), and healthy elderly controls (N = 40).

Structural connectivity in ventral language pathways characterizes non-verbal autism.

Language capacities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) range from normal scores on standardized language tests to absence of functional language in a substantial minority of 30% of individuals with ASD. Due to practical difficulties of scanning at this severe end of the spectrum, insights from MRI are scarce. Here we used manual deterministic tractography to investigate, for the first time, the integrity of the core white matter tracts defining the language connectivity network in non-verbal ASD (nvASD): the three segments of the arcuate (AF), the inferior fronto-occipital (IFOF), the inferior longitudinal (ILF) and the uncinate (UF) fasciculi, and the frontal aslant tract (FAT).

Morphometry and functional connectivity of auditory cortex in school-age children with profound language disabilities: Five comparative case studies.

Many neurodevelopmental conditions imply absent or severely reduced language capacities at school age. Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging is highly limited. We selected a series of five cases scanned with the same fMRI paradigm and the aim of relating individual language profiles onto underlying patterns of functional connectivity (FC) across auditory language cortex: three with neurogenetic syndromes (Coffin-Siris, Landau-Kleffner, and Fragile-X), one with idiopathic intellectual disability, one with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).