The relationship between language disorder and thought disorder: Comparing micro- and macrostructure of spoken narratives of people with aphasia and people with schizophrenia

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Zimmerer, V., Tsoukala, A., Çokal, D., Sevilla, G., Douglas, M., Jones, W., ... & Hinzen, W. (2026). The relationship between language disorder and thought disorder: comparing micro-and macrostructure of spoken narratives of people with aphasia and people with schizophrenia. Cortex (195), 81-95.

What is the relationship between language and thought? Do we think in whichever languages we acquired, or is language merely a code for translating thoughts for communication? These questions are millennia old, but today, they matter beyond our curiosity about the human mind or the structure of our brains. As we close in on solutions that help us detect mental health disorders, or dementia, by the way a person speaks, our understanding of the nature of language and thought becomes a practical, applied issue. Which features of someone’s language inform us about their cognitive health? I think this new publication, in which we compare language production in aphasia (a language disorder) with schizophrenia (a disorder of thought), offers some exciting insights. Or, at the very least, that’s what I hope, because this paper has been very difficult to put together and we all like it when hard work gets recognized.

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Interview for Dementia Action Week.

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University College London (my employer) sent me some interview questions for a profile posted as part of Dementia Action Week. If you want to read the interview, which focuses on my dementia-related research and teaching, click here. Click here to learn what UCL is doing to face the global challenge of dementia.

Thanks to my friend Magnus Long for taking the picture during a stroll through Highgate Wood.

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#TrumpIsNotWell vs. Sleepy Joe: On the weaponization of dementia in politics, and its bleak future.

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When Ronald Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2004, ran for president at age 69 and a second time at 73, senility was part of the public debate. The Democratic Party used it in their campaign. After a presidential debate, a senior Democrat told the press: “Reagan showed his age”.

When dementia is mentioned today, the discourse is much more aggressive. The basic mental capacity of both candidates is under scrutiny.

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Deictic and propositional meaning – new perspectives on language in schizophrenia.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Watson, S., Turkington, D., Ferrier, I.N., & Hinzen, W. (2017). Deictic and propositional meaning – new perspectives on language in schizophrenia. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 8, 1-5.

While schizophrenia is generally considered a thought disorder, its symptoms are to a large degree observable through language. We learn via language about a person's thought disorder and delusions, and most hallucinations in schizophrenia concern hearing voices. Negative symptoms (for example lethargy, aphathy) as well go with changes in communication.

One question that may turn out to be important for understanding schizophrenia, and possibly clinical practice, is whether people with schizophrenia only differ in what they say (for example, if they claim that the Queen is their aunt), but whether they also differ in how they say it.

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Grammatical impairment, historical accidents and silver bullets.

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In 1973, the neurologist Eric Lenneberg made two statements about the nature of language: 1) The rule systems described by Noam Chomsky cannot possibly reflect neurological reality. At best, they serve as metaphors for what the biological language system may do. 2) What is called "Broca's aphasia", the language impairment which results from damage to the frontal lobe of the brain and is characterised by very impoverished and non-fluent speech output, is not a disorder of language per se, but of speaking. It seemed obvious that people with Broca's aphasia could understand language, so Lenneberg believed in the consensus at that time that people with Broca's aphasia found it so difficult to produce speech sounds that they would limit their expressions to the bare minimum.

Lenneberg died two years later, too early to see both statements refuted in the mainstream.

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Language and Mental Health

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The project website is not ready at the time I publish this, so I would like to talk a bit about the big project for which Rosemary Varley and I at UCL are currently recruiting aphasic and non-aphasic participants in the London area.

Broadly, there are two questions that drive all research on language: first, how does this complex and powerful apparatus work, and second, how does it interact with, or form the basis of, human thought? These questions are inherently related. Whether we are investigating how children learn language or how language changes in dementia, whether we are looking at language in the brain or trying to get computers to make use of it, whether we are interested in how a language changes over time or search for properties of language that never change, all work makes assumptions about the relationship between our ability to use language and our ability to think.

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