Michael T Compton, Anya Lunden, Sean D Cleary, Luca Pauselli, Yazeed Alolayan, Brooke Halpern, Beth Broussard, Anthony Crisafio, Leslie Capulong, Pierfrancesco Maria Balducci, Francesco Bernardini, Michael A Covington
OBJECTIVE: Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness. METHODS: Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5)...
February 12, 2018: Schizophrenia Research