The contribution of linguistic studies to the health area will be one of the topics covered in the seminar Speech and schizophrenia: the C-ORAL-ESQ corpus, which will be held on the 15th and 16th of October, in the 2001 auditorium of the Faculty of Arts at UFMG, from 2pm to 5pm.

The Seminar aims to reflect on the research carried out within the scope of the C-ORAL-ESQ project, dedicated to the study of the speech of individuals with schizophrenia. The event is open to students, teachers and the public with an interest in linguistics, psychology, psychiatry, information sciences, philosophy and computing. Spaces are limited and registrations must be made through the UFMG Event Management system. Participation certificates will be issued.

IEAT’s resident professor, Tommaso Raso, from the Faculty of Arts, and professor João Salgado from the Institute of Biological Sciences, coordinators of the C-ORAL-ESQ project at UFMG, will make presentations. They will be accompanied by professors Heliana Mello and Bruno Rocha, also from the Faculty of Arts, who are collaborators on the project, and by guest professor Natália Mota, from the postgraduate course in Neurosciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

Initially, it will be explained how spontaneous speech is organized into prosodic-informational patterns of an actional nature and how these patterns are composed of gestures. From this, it will be shown how corpus linguistics, in particular through multimodal corpora, can provide sources of evidence and patterns characterizing different areas of specialization, as well as pathologies. On the second day, the relationship between schizophrenia and language will be explored in depth and the C-ORAL-ESQ corpus will be presented.

IEAT’s resident professor, Maurício Barcellos, from the UFMG School of Information Science, will also participate in the meeting, with a presentation on the development of an ontology for the field of corpus linguistics.

The seminar will also address the factors that can influence the speech of patients with schizophrenia. From this, computational solutions will be presented for precise quantification of psychopathological changes manifested in speech. Finally, the C-ORAL-ESQ corpus will be presented, focusing both on the compilation methodology and on the perspectives that open up for research into the speech of schizophrenics.

About the C-ORAL-ESQ project
The C-ORAL –ESQ corpus project is dedicated to studying the speech of individuals with schizophrenia. The main objective of the project is to investigate cognitive aspects of individuals with schizophrenia, based on the compilation of a corpus of spontaneous speech and its study, which focuses mainly on the analysis of the structuring of information and its prosodic correlates. The project is linked to C-ORAL-BRASIL, a project dedicated to the study of spontaneous speech for the compilation of oral corpora of Brazilian Portuguese and other languages. C-ORAL-BRASIL is based at the Laboratory for Empirical and Experimental Language Studies (LEEL) at the Faculty of Arts at UFMG.