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Token gestures: Self-repair and gesture in schizophrenia

Abstract:
Many patients with schizophrenia experience difficulty engaging in successful social interaction. Successful social encounters require mutual understanding between interacting partners. To achieve this, partners must monitor their own behaviour, and othersÂ’, for potential misunderstandings and attempt to address them as they arise. One way in which this can be done is self-repair, where the speaker identifies, and repairs or revises, their own speech as it is being produced. When verbal difficulties are encountered people may compensate by using additional multi-modal resources such as hand gesture and head nods. During social interaction, schizophrenia patients repair their own speech less, and make less use of hand gesture when repair is required. This may reflect a disconnect between communication modalities in patients with schizophrenia. Overall, the ability to self-monitor and flexibly modify speech during conversation appears to be impaired in schizophrenia. This may make achieving mutual-understanding more difficult, contributing to the debilitating social deficits experienced by this patient group.
Research areas:
Year:
2015
Type of Publication:
In Proceedings
Book title:
Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) workshop on language in context: an ecological turn to embodied language
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