CLINICAL CORRELATES OF SOME SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF PATIENTSʼ SPEECH

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Abstract
The first phase of a research program directed at the mechanization of segmentation and classification of units of psychiatric interview text is described. A unit called an assertion is defined on the basis of a finite verb fulcrum. As part of this general program, statistics were gathered on the use of various assertion introducers and of various forms of the finite verb, and these were analyzed in relation to the patients' clinical features. The ability of such statistics to discriminate between diagnostic groups was compared with the discriminating power of such general style features as total number of spoken words, frequency of certain key words, type-token ratio, and frequency of certain paralinguistic phenomena. As a group the syntactic scores were much more sensitive discriminators of diagnostic category than were the general style indices. Particularly sensitive indices were: the frequency of the perfect phase form of the finite verb, the frequency of qualifying subordinators as assertion introducers, the frequency of the passive voice, and the frequency of occurrence of a formally defined category of verb called the “state” verb and the “achievement” verb.

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