Dialogical reasoning in patients with schizophrenia - Invited Talk

Abstract:

In this talk we will present an outline of our new project (DRiPS; with Robin Cooper and Mary Lavelle), discuss some of the central issues and report some preliminary results. One of the most debilitating features of schizophrenia is patients’ difficulty interacting with others. An important part of successful interaction is the ability to reason – about the relationship between the discourse and the world, and also about other dialogue participants’ reasoning. We hypothesise that the social cognition impairments seen in patients with schizophrenia are underpinned by difficulties associated with the resources used in reasoning as it occurs in everyday interaction. We will present our unique corpus of patients’ triadic interactions, and show preliminary results that indicate that verbal and non-verbal behaviours are manifest differently in dialogue by patients with schizophrenia. Further, the presence of a patient also has effects on the dialogue behaviours of their healthy interlocutors, even though they were unaware of the patients’ diagnosis. We then show how Type Theory with Records (TTR) can be used to model how people reason in natural language dialogue, using enthymemes, and how this reasoning ability is different in patients with schizophrenia.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Schizophrenia
• Reasoning
• DRiPS

Year:

2017

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

(In)Coherence of Discourse 4

Address:

Nancy, France