Speech Entrainment in Schizophrenia

My latest paper in the Neuroimage: clinical journal assessed the impairments in neural entrainment to speech envelope in early stage psychosis.

Impairments in language processing in Schizophrenia are a central aspect of the disorder but the underlying pathophysiology mechanisms are unclear. We tested the hypothesis that neural oscillations are impaired during speech tracking in early-stage Schizophrenia and in participants at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P).

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used in combination with source reconstructed time-series to examine delta and theta-band entrainment during continuous speech. Participants were presented with a 5-minute audio recording during which they either attended to the story or word level.

Theta-band entrainment in left Heschl’s gyrus, averaged across groups, was significantly lower in the STORY compared to WORD condition, and averaged over conditions, significantly lower in CHR-Ps, but intact in early schizophrenia patients, compared to controls. Correlation analyses between MEG data and symptom indicated that lower theta-band tracking in CHR-Ps was linked to the severity of perceptual abnormalities.

Our results show that CHR-P participants involve impairments in theta-band entrainment during speech tracking in left primary auditory cortex while higher-order speech processing areas were intact. Moreover, the severity of aberrant perceptual experiences in CHR-P participants correlated with deficits in theta-band entrainment. 

Together, these findings highlight the possibility that neural oscillations during language processing could reveal fundamental abnormalities in speech processing which may constitute candidate biomarkers for early detection and diagnosis of Schizophrenia.

Reference:

[1] Tineke Grent-‘t-Jong, Pradeep D, Paolo Fusar-Poli, Joachim Gross, Andrew I Gumley,  Rajeev Krishnadas, Lars Muckli, Peter J Uhlhaas, "Entrainment of Neural Oscillations during Language Processing in Early-Stage Schizophrenia", Neuroimage: Clinical, vol. 44, p. 103695, 2024  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158224001360