Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Research Department, Motrix Laboratory - Motrix, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil; Brain Institute, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil; National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brasília, Brazil.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2023 Oct;8(10):985-993. doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2023.04.004. Epub 2023 Apr 20.
Language has been used as a privileged window to investigate mental processes. More recently, descriptions of psychopathological symptoms have been analyzed with the help of natural language processing tools. An example is the study of speech organization using graph theoretical approaches that began approximately 10 years ago. After its application in different areas, there is a need to better characterize what aspects can be associated with typical and atypical behavior throughout the lifespan, given the variables related to aging as well as biological and social contexts. The precise quantification of mental processes assessed through language may allow us to disentangle biological/social markers by looking at naturalistic protocols in different contexts. In this review, we discuss 10 years of studies in which word recurrence graphs were adopted to characterize the chain of thoughts expressed by individuals while producing discourse. Initially developed to understand formal thought disorder in the context of psychotic syndromes, this line of research has been expanded to understand the atypical development in different stages of psychosis and differential diagnosis (such as dementia) as well as the typical development of thought organization in school-age children/teenagers in naturalistic and school-based protocols. We comment on the effects of environmental factors, such as education and reading habits (in monolingual and bilingual contexts), in clinical and nonclinical populations at different developmental stages (from childhood to older adulthood, considering aging effects on cognition). Looking toward the future, there is an opportunity to use word recurrence graphs to address complex questions that consider biological/social factors within a developmental perspective in typical and atypical contexts.
语言一直被用作研究心理过程的特权窗口。最近，借助自然语言处理工具对精神病理学症状的描述进行了分析。大约 10 年前开始使用图论方法研究言语组织就是一个例子。在不同领域的应用之后，需要更好地描述哪些方面可以与整个生命周期中的典型和非典型行为相关联，因为与衰老以及生物和社会环境相关的变量。通过语言评估的心理过程的精确量化可能使我们能够通过在不同背景下查看自然主义协议来分离生物/社会标记。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了 10 年来采用词语再现图来描述个体在产生话语时表达的思想链的研究。最初开发用于理解精神病综合征背景下的正式思维障碍，这一研究方向已经扩展到理解精神病不同阶段的非典型发展和鉴别诊断（如痴呆）以及在自然和基于学校的协议中在校儿童/青少年的思维组织的典型发展。我们评论了环境因素的影响，例如在不同发育阶段（从儿童到老年，考虑到认知老化的影响）的临床和非临床人群中的教育和阅读习惯（在单语和双语环境中）。展望未来，有机会使用词语再现图来解决复杂的问题，这些问题考虑了典型和非典型背景下的生物/社会因素的发展观点。
