It's not what you said it's the way that you said it: Disorganized schizotypy and speech fluency

Abstract

This study investigated whether disorganized personality, as determined by the Schizotypal Personality questionnaire (SPQ), has any correlation with error repair type disfluencies in running speech. Due to evidence where schizophrenia patients present difficulties with sequencing and sustained attention, it was assumed that those scoring highly on a schizotypy rating would also exhibit these features. These planning level problems were expected to manifest in more error repair disfluencies in running speech. Similarly, links found between schizophrenia and working memory have led to a suggestion that schizotypal participants would also have deficits to a certain extent in this area. As it is suggested that working memory impacts speech fluency, it was also expected that participants with lower scoring responses on a digit span task (DST) would present with greater disfluency. To address these aims, data was collected from 74 participants who were given a set of running speech tasks and DST. Data was perceptually analysed and transcribed orthographically, with error repair type disfluencies noted. The study found that there is a significant correlation between a higher disorganized schizotypy score and higher frequency of error repair disfluencies in running speech tasks, particularly substitutions and deletions in the recall task. However a significant negative correlation was not found between a higher disorganized schizotypy score and DST score. Finally, there was no correlation between DST score and the number of error repair disfluencies in running speech. These results show that there is some interaction between personality and speech fluency.