Heim Stefan, Polyak Stella, Hußmann Katja
Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Nov 16;13:1017865. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1017865. eCollection 2022.
Schizophrenia is characterised foremost by hallucinations, delusions and disorganised speech. Deficits in the internal speech monitor may contribute to the development of auditory-verbal hallucinations. This study investigates potential effects in the opposite direction: could the presence of auditory-verbal hallucinations have an effect on speech production? To this end, a recent mimicking/simulation approach was adopted for 40 healthy participants who perceived either white noise or hallucination-like speech recordings during different language production tasks with increasing demands: picture naming, verbal fluency with and without category switch, sentence production, and discourse. In line with reports about real schizophrenia cases in the literature, mimicking auditory-verbal hallucinations affected verbal fluency (switch condition) and sentence production (duration) in a different way than mere noise. These effects were not correlated, suggesting that hallucinations may even affect different levels of linguistic complexity in different ways. Anyway, in both cases (mimicked), auditory hallucination appear to contribute to the emergence of disordered speech. The mimicking/simulation paradigm may in future help to identify and disentangle the various factors contributing to disorganised speech in schizophrenia. They may also support the development and implementation of new protocols, e.g., in speech and language therapy in persons with schizophrenia in order to improve their communication skills despite the presence of auditory-verbal hallucinations.
精神分裂症的主要特征是幻觉、妄想和言语紊乱。内部言语监测缺陷可能导致听幻觉的产生。本研究调查相反方向的潜在影响：听幻觉的存在是否会对言语产生有影响？为此，对40名健康参与者采用了一种最近的模仿/模拟方法，他们在不同要求不断增加的语言产生任务（图片命名、有无类别转换的言语流畅性、句子产生和语篇）中，分别感知白噪声或类似幻觉的言语录音。与文献中关于真实精神分裂症病例的报道一致，模仿听幻觉对言语流畅性（转换条件）和句子产生（持续时间）的影响与单纯噪声不同。这些影响不相关，表明幻觉甚至可能以不同方式影响不同语言复杂程度的水平。无论如何，在两种（模仿）情况下，听幻觉似乎都导致言语紊乱的出现。模仿/模拟范式未来可能有助于识别和理清导致精神分裂症言语紊乱的各种因素。它们还可能支持新方案的开发和实施，例如，用于精神分裂症患者的言语和语言治疗，以便在存在听幻觉的情况下提高他们的沟通能力。
