Aberrant salience
Situations where ordinary things feel unusually significant or personally charged. Used here as a description of shifting attention and meaning.
Reference
Glossary: Language, Psychosis, and Meaning
This glossary supports viewers and listeners who encounter specialised or unfamiliar terms in my podcasts and YouTube work. The aim is not to fix authoritative definitions, but to offer accessible working explanations that reflect how these terms are used here.
Nothing here is intended as diagnostic guidance, medical advice, or instruction. Where clinical terms appear, they are explained descriptively and interpretively, not prescriptively.
This glossary is a living document.
A
Affect / affective change
Felt emotional tone—how something lands emotionally—often used to describe changes in texture rather than named emotions.
Affective flattening
Reduced outward expression of emotion, even when internal feeling remains.
Alogia
Reduced amount or ease of speech, treated here as a language phenomenon with multiple possible causes.
Anhedonia
Reduced capacity to experience pleasure or interest.
Antipsychotic (medication)
A class of medications used in psychosis-related care; discussed descriptively, not prescriptively.
Association / associative thinking
Linking ideas by meaning, sound, memory, or feeling rather than explicit logic alone.
B
Belief fixation
When an idea becomes resistant to revision even in the presence of counterevidence.
Boundary of interpretation
The point where interpretation becomes ethically risky or coercive.
C
Cognitive load
The mental effort required to process information or produce speech.
Clinical language
Professional terminology used in healthcare, often misaligned with lived description.
Coherence
The sense that speech “hangs together,” which can be partial or local.
Cohesion
Linguistic links between sentences (pronouns, repetition, connectives).
Context collapse
Breakdown of assumed shared background between speaker and listener.
D
Dataset / corpus
A structured collection of language data used for analysis.
DAIS-C
A spoken-language corpus for research on abstract discussion in schizophrenia.
Delusion
A clinical term; here examined through language, reasoning, and meaning organisation.
Derailment
Topic shifts with weak or hidden links.
Discourse
Language beyond single sentences—how talk unfolds over time.
E
Epistemic position
Where someone is speaking from: what they can reasonably claim to know.
Epistemic humility
Restraint in inference under uncertainty.
Epistemic injustice
Discrediting someone as a knower due to stigma or diagnosis.
F
Formal thought disorder (FTD)
A label for difficult-to-follow speech, approached here linguistically.
Form vs content
Form concerns structure; content concerns topic. They can change independently.
Z
Zone of interpretive risk
Moments where interpretation is likely to overreach ethically.
This glossary is intentionally expansive and includes both single terms and multi-word phrases used across transcripts. Definitions may evolve as the work develops.