The dissertation is dedicated to the psycholinguistic analysis of the features of oral and written speech in patients with schizophrenia and their associative background.
Speech characteristics are considered the subject of linguistic research, with speech manifestations analyzed at various language levels. Additionally, a psycholinguistic research algorithm aimed at identifying schizophrenia has been developed. The need for a comprehensive study of the speech characteristics of patients with
schizophrenia in the context of contemporary psycholinguistic analysis drives the relevance of the dissertation. Despite the significant social importance of addressing mental health issues and existing research in psychiatry, Ukrainian linguistics lacks a systematic approach to studying the speech manifestations of this patient group. This
highlights the necessity for an in-depth theoretical and practical understanding, as well as the development of effective methods for describing and diagnosing speech disorders associated with higher mental function impairments, particularly in conditions such as schizophrenia.
The dissertation aims to identify and analyze the speech complex of patients with schizophrenia in relation to its psycholinguistic nature. Achieving this goal involves collecting factual material relevant for a comprehensive psycholinguistic analysis, identifying the main lexical, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic features in the oral
speech materials, and characterizing the specifics of written speech at the lexicalgrammatical and graphic levels among individuals with schizophrenia. It also includes conducting an associative experiment, documenting and interpreting the characteristic features of the associative background of such patients, integrating the results of oral
speech, written speech, and the associative experiment to develop an algorithm for a comprehensive psycholinguistic study of schizophrenia manifestations, verifying the feasibility and scientific objectivity of applying such an algorithm, and summarizing the obtained results to formulate practical recommendations for its application.
The object of the study is the speech of patients with schizophrenia, while the subject comprises the lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic features of their oral and written speech, as well as the associative background of their communication.
The research material includes 18 fragments of oral speech from patients with a total duration of 1 hour and 18 minutes, 2 fragments of written speech from a patient with schizophrenia, 53 associative reactions from patients, and 548 associative reactions from mentally healthy individuals.
All factual material was collected at Odesa Regional Psychiatric Hospital No. 4 between 2010 and 2019, recorded on audio devices (voice recorders), transcribed, and reformatted into a structure suitable for reading and analysis.
The methodological framework of the research is based on general scientific and specialized methods. Among the general scientific methods, the observation method was employed to collect and record relevant factual material; the quantitative method helped establish the number of instances of multi-level speech disturbances and the
overall dynamics of the analyzed material; the descriptive method was used to provide a general characterization of the collected material; and the comparative method allowed for identifying distinctive features of the speech of healthy respondents and patients with schizophrenia.
Among the specialized methods, the free-associative experiment method enabled tracking the dynamics of associative connections in the consciousness of patients and comparing them with the reactions of healthy respondents to highlight differences.
Component analysis facilitated the identification of semantic features of grammatical and lexical markers in the speech of patients with schizophrenia. Contextualinterpretive analysis, comprising a set of procedures, was used to determine the semantic changes that the established semantic structure of a word undergoes in a
specific context. Elements of pragmalinguistic analysis were applied to clarify the communicative strategies present in the patients' speech. Additionally, elements of graphological analysis were used to identify features of written speech.
The research is based on the principles of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and pathological psycholinguistics, as well as L. Vygotsky's theory of higher mental functions.
The dissertation examines the issue of linguistic personality (LP), specifically LP with pathological speech impairments caused by mental illness. The study's findings confirm that speech disorders in patients with schizophrenia manifest at all linguistic levels.
