[murphyslab]

Yes. And for bilingual patients, there seems to be a greater effect on the more recently acquired language:

> Southwood et al[49] make the same recommendation based on oral interviews conducted with a single male patient who displayed more language disturbances in his second language than in his native language. Armon-Lotem et al[50] also describe schizophrenia patients who display more problems in their second language than in their first. Smirnova et al[42], in their study of 10 Russian Hebrew bilinguals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, also found that some syntax and semantic impairments were more pronounced in the later-learned language.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4919257/

[jschrf]

Very interesting, thank you. Feels like an inverse effect of where multilingual people fall back to their first language for counting things.

Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if there's some similarly inverted connection to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis here, where languages affect the way we actually think.

People suffering on the Schizophrenic spectrum often hyperfocus on topics, and secondary grammars and semantics seem like worthy candidates.

Still thinking out loud, I guess I can see how a new "alien" language (i.e. not someone's native) could lead someone on the schizophrenic spectrum to a fixation and a pole for clanging.

Schizo-affected people often attach to new topics of interest - conspiracies, delusions, new nodes in their social graph, et al - I can see how linguistics would fit in here.