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Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
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Published on: September 19, 2019

Content and style of speech from mothers with schizophrenia towards their infants

Ming Wai Wan1, Victoria Penketh, Margaret P Salmon

  • 1Centre for Women's Mental Health Research, Division of Psychiatry, Williamson Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom. m.w.wan@manchester.ac.uk

Psychiatry Research
|March 11, 2008
PubMed

Schizophrenia can affect verbal communication and relational processes, but how it might disrupt maternal infant-directed (ID) speech is unknown. Maternal speech characteristics were coded, blind to clinical information, from brief videotaped mother-infant interactions of 14 mothers with schizophrenia and 36 mothers with similar hospitalisation but with other clinical diagnoses. Compared with the non-schizophrenia group, the speech of mothers with schizophrenia was less infant-focused. Infant-focused content was also predicted by maternal age, but not by duration of hospitalisation or infant gender. Mothers with schizophrenia also used significantly fewer songs or rhymes than the comparison group, and showed a trend towards fewer negative comments. Speech prosody/content deviations were rarely observed in either group, and no differences were found in speech rate or structure. The marked lack of ID speech content of mothers with schizophrenia reflects low maternal sensitivity, perhaps due to 'theory of mind' impairment and blunted affect, and may contribute to the early developmental vulnerability of their children.

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