Investigating temporal and prosodic markers in clinical high-risk for psychosis participants using automated acoustic analysis
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Updated: Aug 26, 2025
Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Bianca Bianciardi1, Ruchika Gajwani2, Joachim Gross3
1Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
Aim:
Language disturbances are a candidate biomarker for the early detection of psychosis. Temporal and prosodic abnormalities have been observed in schizophrenia patients, while there is conflicting evidence whether such deficits are present in participants meeting clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) criteria.
Methods:
Clinical interviews from CHR-P participants (n = 50) were examined for temporal and prosodic metrics and compared against a group of healthy controls (n = 17) and participants with affective disorders and substance abuse (n = 23).
Results:
There were no deficits in acoustic variables in the CHR-P group, while participants with affective disorders/substance abuse were characterized by slower speech rate, longer pauses and higher unvoiced frames percentage.
Conclusion:
Our finding suggests that temporal and prosodic aspects of speech are not impaired in early-stage psychosis. Further studies are required to clarify whether such abnormalities are present in sub-groups of CHR-P participants with elevated psychosis-risk.
