www.christinehowes.com

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 -- not only about the relation between the discourse and the world, but also about the reasoning of other dialogue participants. This project aims to investigate and model how people reason in natural language dialogue, using the notion of enthymemes, and how this reasoning ability is different in patients with schizophrenia.

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.

Through access to a unique corpus of patients' triadic interactions we have the opportunity to explore reasoning in patients' face-to-face dialogues to investigate this theory. Furthermore, we will identify and analyse verbal and nonverbal markers of social impairments during reasoning, using state of the art methods from computational linguistics and gesture research.

Specifically, this project will address the following questions:

(1) In terms of natural language reasoning, how do patients with schizophrenia differ from their healthy interlocutors (patients' partners) and how do both of these groups differ from participants in dialogues without a patient (controls)?
    (a) How do the participants reason -- are there  differences between the groups in terms of the arguments they use and how they express them?
    (b) Are there differences between the groups during reasoning sequences in terms of verbal dialogue behaviour (e.g. the use of repair, specific words and expressions)?
    (c) Does the use of head and hand gesture during reasoning sequences differ between patients, patients' partners and controls?
(2) How do these factors interact and can we give a precise account of any differences?

This project is being funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond, between 2017 and 2020 (P16-0805:1).

The project plan can be accessed here.

 

2023

Howes, C. & Lavelle, M. (2023). Quirky conversations: How patients with schizophrenia do dialogue differently. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, . [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2022

Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2022). "He hasn’t done much to keep it up": Annotating topoi in the balloon task. In Proceedings of the 26th Workshop On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DubDial) - Poster Abstracts, pages 224-226. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C (2022). Quirky conversations: How patients with schizophrenia do dialogue differently - Invited talk. In Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

2021

Breitholtz, E., Cooper, R., Howes, C. & Lavelle, M (2021). Reasoning in multiparty dialogue involving patients with schizophrenia. In Amblard, M. (editor), (In)Coherence of Discourse. Springer. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C., Breitholtz, E., Lavelle, M. & Cooper, R (2021). Justifiable reasons for everyone: Dialogical reasoning in patients with schizophrenia. In Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. SEMDIAL. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Lavelle, M (2021). Mis-taking turns: Conversing with a patient with schizophrenia. In The Role of the Current Speaker in Conversational Turn Taking – Theoretical, Experimental, and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives on Speaker Contributions to Aligned Turn-Timing. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Ioussef, D., Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2021). Don’t you think that a rhetorical question can convey an argument?. In Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. SEMDIAL. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2020

Noble, B., Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2020). Personae under uncertainty: The case of topoi. In Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020), pages 8-16. Gothenburg : Association for Computational Linguistics. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2019

Lavelle, M. & Howes, C (2019). Turn-taking and other interactional issues in patients with schizophrenia. In Workshop on Formal Approaches to (In)coherence and Dynamics in Dialogue. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2018

Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2018). Relating coordination in non-linguistic games and dialogue games. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Dialogue and Perception, pages 17-21. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2018). How to play games with types. In Symposium on Logic and Algorithms in Computational Linguistic. Stockholm. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2018). Towards a game theory for conversational rhetoric. In Sociolinguistic, Psycholinguistic and Formal Perspectives on Meaning. Paris. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Lavelle, M., Howes, C., Healey, P. G. & McCabe, R (2018). Are we having a laugh? Conversational laughter in schizophrenia. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Dialogue and Perception, pages 35-37. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2017

Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2017). Dialogical Reasoning in Patients with Schizophrenia - Invited Talk. In (In)Coherence of Discourse 4. Nancy, France. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Cooper, R (2017). How to play games with types. In Workshop on Context and Reasoning in Dialogue and Other Media. Paris. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Howes, C., Lavelle, M., Healey, P. G., Hough, J. & McCabe, R (2017). Disfluencies in dialogues with patients with schizophrenia. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. London, UK. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C., Lavelle, M., Healey, P. G., Hough, J. & McCabe, R (2017). Do patients with schizophrenia do dialogue differently?. In Proceedings of the 7th Joint Action Meeting (JAM). London, UK. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Howes, C., Lavelle, M., Healey, P. G., Hough, J. & McCabe, R (2017). Self-repair in dialogue with patients with schizophrenia. In Communication and Cognition - Miscommunication: Getting lost in language(s). [More] [Digital version] [Slides] [Bibtex]