Clinical Phenomena

Speech is a window into cognition, and clinical research has spent a century building vocabulary for what it sees there: derailment, tangentiality, poverty of speech, perseveration, pressure of speech. These articles are about recognizing those phenomena in real transcripts—not the textbook one-liner, but the boundary cases that make two trained raters disagree.

Each phenomenon gets the same treatment: what the construct means, how the major assessment scales (TLC, PANSS, BPRS) operationalize it, worked examples in synthetic transcript text, and the coding decisions that separate a defensible annotation from a guess. Because the hard part is never the prototypical case—it is deciding where circumstantiality ends and tangentiality begins, or whether a repeated phrase is perseveration or emphasis.

This is the domain content that annotation projects in computational psychiatry, speech-language pathology, and psychotherapy research are built on. It pairs naturally with the Reliability & Agreement section: a construct you cannot annotate consistently is a construct you cannot study.