Table 1 Social factors with reported influence on quantitative speech markers.

From: More than a biomarker: could language be a biosocial marker of psychosis?

Speech markers relevant to psychosis

Non-biological (social) factors with demonstrable influence in healthy subjects

Graph connectivity

Family income

Years of education

Length of utterance

Institutionalization

Lexical diversity

Parental socioeconomic status

Neighbourhood

Institutionalization

Parts of speech (function words)

Parental education

Bilingualism

Dialect variations

Pauses and prosody

Binary entity described as racea

Dialect variations

Semantic coherence

Binary entity described as raceb

Semantic density

Bilingualism

Syntactic complexity

Social class

  1. All listed speech markers are identified as promising candidates for computational linguistic analysis in psychosis (see Hitczenko and colleagues12). Individual studies with supporting evidence are discussed in the text. Most of the included studies were not specifically powered to examine the reported associations; the associations listed in this table are best considered as signals that require further systematic evaluation and not as conclusive links.
  2. aRace was evaluated as a binary variable (Black or African-American/White)66,67, without a multidimensional assessment of underlying components75.
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