Linguistic characteristics of texts of mentally ill and healthy people

Abstract

The article provides an overview of existing methods of text intelligent analysis used as research tools in clinical psychology and psychiatry. A linguistic analysis of the texts written by healthy people (142 people) and patients with endogenous mental diseases (22 people) was conducted at the first stage of the development of a complex method of linguistic text analysis taking into account lexical as well as other aspects of written speech. To analyze the semantic-syntactic structure of utterances, the relational-situational analysis method was used, which is based on Zolotova’s sintaxemes analysis and on the concept of heterogeneous semantic networks by G.S. Osipov. Also, a method of the lexical frequency analysis was employed using the PLATIn analyzer, developed on the basis of the Exactus Expert processor. The used methods allowed identifying differences in the texts with respect to a number of parameters: characteristics of the syntactic structure of sentences and semantic roles of predicates, psycholinguistic and lexical emotional markers, characteristics of the topics discussed in the text. It is shown that the parameters related to the semantic roles of predicates - agents, causative agents, facilitators, predicates, instrumentalities, generatives - are significantly reduced in the patients. Differences in the psycholinguistic indicators, such as the first person plural pronouns, the first person singular pronouns, the Treiger index, the ratio of the number of infinitives to the total number of verbs are connected with psychopathological deficit symptoms and self-focused attention in the patients. The characteristics of the discussed topics showed the relevance of the illness and health care and less frequent mentioning other social problems in the texts of the patients.