Support for a novel, simple method for calculating word frequency of output on language production tasks

Conference presentation

• Author: Petar Gabrić https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2644-194X
• Author: Arne Nagels; ScopusID: 36490305200
• Author: Tilo Kircher https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2514-2625
• Author: Anna Rosenkranz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5559-1248
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: BIOMEDICINE AND HEALTHCARE; Clinical Medical Sciences; Psychiatry
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: INTERDISCIPLINARY AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE; Cognitive Science (Natural, Technical, Biomedical and Healthcare, Social and Humanistic Sciences)
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology; General Linguistics
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: SOCIAL SCIENCES; Psychology; Clinical and Health Psychology
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology; German Studies

Abstract (english)

Introduction: Studies consistently report that patients with schizophrenia exhibit qualitative abnormalities on language production tasks. These abnormalities are possibly associated with the severity of psychotic symptoms. Despite this, some studies have conflictingly suggested that patients with schizophrenia exhibit similar word frequency (WF) effects on lexical tasks compared to healthy subjects. Given that previous studies calculated WFs from language corpora, we aimed to investigate the relationship between WF and psychotic symptoms using a novel, simple method for calculating WF.

Methods: Thirty-six patients with schizophrenia were included in the study. The severity of positive symptoms was measured using the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS). One semantic and one letter fluency task were administered with the patients instructed to produce as many animal names and words beginning with the letter p in 60 s, respectively. Every response in the output was assigned (1) a corpus-based WF, extracted from the German-language lexical database dlexDB, and (2) a within-sample WF. The within-sample WF was calculated as the raw number of participants who produced the word. Spearman’s correlations were computed between the WF variables and symptoms.

Results: Corpus-based WF exhibited skewed, kurtic, and/or non-normal distribution. Contrastingly, within-sample WF displayed normal, non-skewed, and non-kurtic distribution. There were no significant correlations between corpus-based WF and symptoms on both tasks. Conversely, within-sample WF on semantic fluency was significantly negatively and weakly correlated with the global SAPS score, as well as subscales measuring delusions and bizarre behavior. Further, within-sample WF on letter fluency was significantly positively and weakly correlated with the subscale measuring bizarre behavior of the SAPS scale.

Conclusion: The differences in the data distribution patterns between corpus-based WF and within-sample WF indicate that different methodological frameworks may have better use of one or the other variable type. Further, significant correlations with positive symptoms were observed only for within-sample WF. It can be concluded that within-sample WF may be more appropriate for analyzing verbal fluency output in psychiatric research compared to corpus-based WF.

• Keywords (english): schizophrenia; word frequency; language production; lexical processing; verbal fluency; positive symptoms
• Keywords (croatian): shizofrenija; frekvencija riječi; jezična produkcija; leksička obrada; verbalna fluentnost; pozitivni simptomi
• Language: english
• Peer review: No peer review
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5616078
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:283638
• Presentation date: 2021-11-10
• Project: Number: 01UL1812X; Title (german): Ergänzende Methoden in etablierten Untersuchungen in der Erkennung von Beeinträchtigungen der Wortfindung bei dementiellen Erkrankungen und Schizophrenie – eine klinisch-linguistische Aufarbeitung; Title (english): Additional performance measures for the identification of word-finding difficulties in patients with dementia and patients with schizophrenia; Leader: Anna Rosenkranz; Jurisdiction: Germany
• Conference: Title: International Workshop on Language Production 2021; Acronym: IWoLP; Location: Online, Netherlands; Organizer: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Start date: 2021-11-02; End date: 2021-11-15; Assembly type: Lecture
• Document URL: https://zenodo.org/record/5616078
• Type of resource: Text
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2021-10-29 19:06:43