Linguistics Features and Trauma: An Integrated Neurolinguistic and Computational Analysis of PTSD Narratives-a Pilot Study

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to linguistic differences in the representation and structuring of traumatic experience. A computational linguistic analysis of these linguistic differences may allow exploring the morphosyntactic features of trauma-related stories. This pilot study has been designed to analyze selected morphosyntactic features of the stories told by PTSD patients and healthy controls through an integrated Neurolinguistic and computational approach. For this purpose, the study has recruited 40 participants, including 20 patients of PTSD and 20 controls from a tertiary care hospital in Lahore, Pakistan. Selected morphosyntactic features are being analyzed in terms of part-of-speech patterns, pronouns, verb tense, negation, dependency patterns, sentence complexity, and morphological properties. A comparative analysis of PTSD and non-PTSD narratives is performed to detect differences. The study has shown different morphosyntactic features of the stories of individuals diagnosed with PTSD and healthy control participants. Thus, the present study provides preliminary evidence on the possible significance of linguistic structure in the analysis of trauma-related language. The integrated framework combines computational identification of linguistic structure with Neurolinguistic interpretation of possible significance of this structure. Being a pilot study and having a relatively small number of participants, the findings of this study cannot be generalized. The pilot study demonstrates the potential of an integrated Neurolinguistic and computational approach to the study of PTSD-related language and provides a preliminary basis for further research.