Discourse Features of Patients with Schizoaffective Disorder

According to the World Health Organization about 1% of global population are affected by schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder prevalence is about 0.5%. Schizoaffective disorder is very hard to identify and distinguish from schizophrenia due to the common symptoms. These illnesses mostly involve impaired thinking that could be evaluated through speech analysis There are recent investigations on the specific marks both of schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia speech, however, there is a lack of obtained to Russian language. The purpose of the present research is to rate and compare the discourse of patients with schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia patients and neurologically healthy participants. The speech was elicited by four tasks to involve different types of oral speech, two tasks on picture description and storytelling, procedural discourse and personal narrative and then annotated in ELAN program. Also, Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANNS) and Scale for the Assessment of Thought, Language and Communication (TCL) psychiatric scales were used for all the participants screening. The results revealed no differences between schizophrenia and schizoaffective patients, but linguistic variables could predict the overall scores on psychiatric tests and distinguish between clinicals and control groups. The results of the study can help in future schizophrenia psychosis early diagnosis research.