Relationship between grammar and schizophrenia: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia significantly impairs everyday communication, affecting education and employment. Such communication difficulties may arise from deficits in syntax-understanding and generating grammatical structures. Research on syntactic impairments in schizophrenia is underpowered, with inconsistent findings, and it is unclear if deficits are specific to certain patient subgroups, regardless of symptom profiles, age, sex, or illness severity. METHODS: A pre-registered (Open Science Framework: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7FZUC ) search using PubMed, Scopus, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases up to May 1, 2024, for all studies investigating syntax comprehension and production in schizophrenia vs. healthy controls. Excluding studies on those <18 years of age and qualitative research, we extracted Cohen's d and log coefficient of variation ratio and used Bayesian meta-analysis across 6 domains: 2 in comprehension and 4 in production in patient-control comparisons. Study quality was evaluated using a modified Newcastle-Ottawa Scale, with moderators (age, sex, study quality, language) tested via meta-regression. RESULTS: We identify 86 relevant articles, of which 45 have sufficient data for meta-analysis (n = 2960 participants, 64.4% English, weighted mean age(sd) = 32.3(5.6)). Bayesian meta-analysis shows strong evidence of syntactic deficits in schizophrenia across all domains (d = 0.65-1.01, overall random-effects d = 0.86, 95% CrI [0.67-1.03]), with syntax comprehension being most affected, with weak publication bias. People with schizophrenia show increased variability in comprehension and production of long and complex utterances (lnCVR = 0.21, 95% CrI [0.07-0.36]), hinting at subgroups with differing performance. CONCLUSIONS: Robust impairments in grammatical comprehension and production in schizophrenia suggest opportunities for targeted interventions focusing on syntax, a rule-based feature amenable to cognitive, educational, and linguistic interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.016 | 0.033 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".