The C-ORAL-ESQ corpus and the informational structure of patients with schizophrenia

Abstract

This paper presents the C-ORAL-ESQ, a speech corpus of Brazilian patients with schizophrenia. The corpus will comprise 40 psychotherapy sessions with male and female patients, different age and schooling levels. The C-ORAL-ESQ will be segmented into utterances and intonation units based on a prosodic/pragmatic criterion that regards the utterance as a speech act (AUSTIN, 1962), i.e., a stretch of speech that is autonomous from the prosodic and pragmatic standpoint (CRESTI, 2000). Furthermore, this paper reports studies carried out by Cresti, Dovetto, and Rocha that have looked at informational structure in the speech of Italian patients with schizophrenia (CRESTI; DOVETTO; ROCHA, 2015). The authors have pointed out a tendency for some patients to produce utterances with less variability in terms of both illocutionary types and non-illocutionary tone units.