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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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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