Linguistic prosody perception in schizophrenia patients

People with schizophrenia experience difficulties in social interactions and communication with others, attributed, among others, to deficits in speech prosody perception. While deficits in the perception of affective prosody are relatively well documented in studies across many languages, much less is known about the perception of linguistic prosody. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prosody perception abilities of individuals with schizophrenia in four different linguistic prosody tasks - distinguishing between questions and statements (speech act recognition), determining whether an utterance is complete or whether more information is forthcoming (turn-taking), distinguishing between appositives and vocatives (phrasing), and interpreting the meaning implied by focus placement (information structure interpretation). We designed a test battery in Psychopy3 and tested in with 45 schizophrenia outpatients from Poland and 45 age and education matched healthy controls. Our results suggest that individuals with schizophrenia do experience greater difficulty with linguistic (i.e. non-emotional) prosody perception than healthy controls and that there is a relationships between PANSS and linguistic prosody perception. Nevertheless, neither the individual tasks we developed nor a multi-measure of linguistic prosody perception were sufficient to reliably distinguish between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Both groups included individuals with high and low scores, and the majority of patients with schizophrenia performed well in most tasks.