Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

Patients with schizophrenia and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) in their frontal variant share some language characteristics usually associated with executive function or behavioural symptoms. For the schizophrenia patients it reflects a difficulty on affect expression and behaviour, while for the FTD patients it reflects an executive deficit. However, little is known about impairments related to grammar or language structure and lexicon when a specific language assessment is done. The aim of the symposium is to is to describe language alterations in this population and its possible relationship with critical areas in diagnosis and the search of recovery of patients with schizophrenia and frontotemporal dementia. A linguistic analysis of a series of patients with those diagnoses. The ultimate goal is to guide the specialist in finding early markers of a differential diagnosis, also, to describe the link between sentence comprehension and executive functions. The nature of the language deficits could help us to understand how language, behaviour, and executive functions work together. Our results show that both groups have difficulties with syntax (in particular negative sentences) as well as discourse programming. Schizophrenia patients show selective prosodic difficulties as well as disruptions in discourse. We will present how depth language assessment allows us to reassess some of the rules for the speech and prosody analysis of patients with dementia and schizophrenia.