Am J Psychiatry 1988; 145:464-468
Copyright © 1988 by American Psychiatric Association
Diagnostic classification through content analysis of patients' speech
TE Oxman, SD Rosenberg, PP Schnurr and GJ Tucker
Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH 03756.
Speech samples from 71 patients in four diagnostic groups were analyzed by
two quantitative methods of speech content analysis, the results of which
were entered into a discriminant analysis to test whether patients could be
accurately classified back into their appropriate diagnostic groups. These
classifications were compared with classifications made by two
psychiatrists, blind to the patients' diagnoses, who read transcripts of
the speech samples. The results suggest that data from the systematic
quantification of lexical choice can be used to classify patients into
their respective diagnostic groups and that this classification compares
favorably with that done by psychiatric raters.
