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Prosodic discrimination in patients with schizophrenia

Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK and Department of Psychiatry, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan

G. T. Samson, BSc

Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

O. D. O'Daly, MSc

Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

D. K. Tracy, MRCPsych

Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK

A. D. Patel, PhD

Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California, USA

S. S. Shergill, MRCPsych, PhD

Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry and Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK

Correspondence: Dr K. Matsumoto, Department of Psychiatry, Tohoku University School of Medicine, Sendai, 980-8574 Japan. Email: kaz-mat{at}umin.ac.jp

Declaration of interest None.

Funding detailed in Acknowledgements.

Summary Fifteen patients with prominent positive symptoms of schizophrenia and 15 normal controls performed verbal prosodic and pure musical discrimination tasks, with changes in pitch and timing parameters. The patients' performance was comparable to that of controls on the discrimination of terminal pitch changes, but significantly poorer on the more difficult internal pitch discrimination. The latter deficit was positively correlated with the severity of their positive symptoms. The results suggest that patients have a deficit in processing fundamental aspects of prosody, which is associated with the presence of positive symptoms.