Narrative Story-telling of Mandarin-speaking Patients with Schizophrenia
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Hsu, Ning
Abstract
The present study investigates the narrative story-telling of Mandarin-speaking patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disease characterized by abnormalities in perception and expression, with disorganized speech being one of its representative characteristics. This study aims to provide a comprehensive characterization of schizophrenic speech in Mandarin. Narrative story-telling samples were collected from two groups of participants: the normal control group (20 participants) and the schizophrenic group (22 participants). Participants were asked to narrate three picture stories: (1) the Couple Story, (2) the Old Man and the Dog Story, and (3) the Frog Story. Narrative samples were analyzed using a Mandarin version of Narrative Assessment Profile (NAP), a profile analysis that was designed to evaluate discourse coherence in both typical and atypical speakers (McCabe & Bliss, 2003). Eight dimensions of the narrative performance were examined. They are topic maintenance, event sequencing, reasonableness, referential skill, background information, evaluation, conjunctive cohesion, and the narrative pattern. In addition to the discourse level analysis, lexical choices of specific connectives (causal connectives and contrastive connectives) and verbal predicates (perceptual verbs, psych verbs, and mental verbs) were computed. The study also includes an analysis of character representation within narratives.
Schizophrenic narrators in this study had a significantly weaker narrative performance in both discourse level and word level. Their performance in six narrative dimensions (i.e. topic maintenance, reasonableness, background information, evaluation, conjunctive cohesion, and the narrative pattern) was significantly weaker. However, they seemed to preserve an intact ability to identify basic elements in narratives, performing comparably well in dimensions of event sequencing and referential skill. Lexical analysis showed that the schizophrenic group used less contrastive connectives and mental verbs when telling their stories, echoing the findings of NAP. Patients also demonstrated a more superficial character representation in narratives, from which the diminishments of language ability were related with the decline of Theory of Mind (ToM) ability.
Subjects
narratives
schizophrenia
thought disorder
Narrative Assessment Profile (NAP)
character representation
Type
thesis
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