Alogia

Alogia is poor thinking inferred from a person's speech and language usage. It manifests in two principal forms: poverty of speech, meaning brief and concrete replies to questions with restricted spontaneous speech, and poverty of content, where speech is adequate in quantity but conveys little information because it is vague, empty, stereotyped, overconcrete, overabstract, or repetitive. The term derives from Greek roots meaning without speech. Alogia is traditionally considered a negative symptom and occurs across several psychiatric and neurological conditions, most commonly schizophrenia, where negative symptoms including alogia are responsible for much of the disease's morbidity compared with other psychotic disorders. It also appears in dementia, severe depression, autism, and schizotypal personality disorder, and can significantly complicate psychotherapy by making fluent conversation difficult to sustain.