Speech Peculiarities Noted Decades Ago

I am writing in response to the article “Innovation Lab Winner Uses Speech Analysis to Diagnose Psychosis” in the July 15 issue.

Around 1955, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, M.D., recorded an interview on a device known as a wire recorder. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said that he had noticed some minor peculiarities in the speech of some mildly disturbed individuals, perhaps signs of borderline psychotic individuals.

When he asked his secretary to transcribe the interview, he noticed that these language peculiarities were missing from the transcript. He realized that the listener tends to make corrections in his or her own mind for speech peculiarities. He had to train his secretary to transcribe what she had really heard and not to correct the text.

Lawrence Kubie used this method even when he was interviewing applicants for the psychiatry residency program at Yale. Kubie was a careful listener, and he would have been interested in Jim Schwoebel’s careful computerized listener.

John S. Kafka, M.D. (Bethesda, Maryland) ■